Shocking but brutal, Hacksaw Ridge shows the brilliance of humanity in war

Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge is one of the best World War II films since Terrence Malik's The Thin Red Line. In some ways, this is also an extremely contradictory film, combining easy-going with pathology. The bloody moments here remind us of Gibson's obsession with the Bible and his extreme fascination with violence and suffering.

It's an exciting film in which Andrew Garfield plays not only an all-American hero, but also another battered martyr in Gibson's pen. Desmond Doss was a military objector who thrived in battle. As inspired by him, Gibson made an anti-war movie, but somehow the film was a military-style action movie, full of camaraderie and courage.

In the final scene in Okinawa, Gibson spares no effort to show the compassion and dirtiness of the war. Still, he's obsessed with shots of characters' heads blown up, limbs blown off, or flamethrowers burned to ashes, which can be a bit morbid. In this massacre, Gibson added a large number of chauvinism similar to those of the old hero style similar to the image in his own Mad Max movie. We saw characters kicking off grenades and camouflaging themselves in the mud, and the audience cheered in adrenaline-filled ecstasy.

Desmond grew up in a small town in Virginia in the 1930s, and he was a child when he first met people when he and his brother Hal were fighting and they were crazy kids. Their father, Tom, was a World War I veteran and is now a resentful, self-deprecating alcoholic who is left to their own devices. When they fought, he always stood by and watched. These early scenes show that Desmond was reckless and brave, but at heart a good lad who would be frightened by his own violence.

Garfield plays the young Desmond with a clumsy charm reminiscent of what James Stewart looked like early in his career. Quick-witted, he intervenes in a fortuitous coincidence to save the life of an accident victim, and then exhibits the same improvisational ability when he talks sweetly with his lover, the beautiful young nurse Dorothy (Teresa Palmer).

These early scenes are idyllic, but also full of foreshadowing and foreshadowing. Desmond's father, Tom, was a ghost at the banquet. The grief was the lingering expression on his face, his frequent abuse of his wife, and his habit of drinking heavily at the local cemetery and smashing bottles on the tombstones of fallen comrades-in-arms, let us know that there will be troubled moments ahead.

Gibson was reluctant to dig deep into the dark corners of Desmond's upbringing or psychology. The reasons for the young man's refusal to perform military service are not clearly expressed. His religious beliefs (he was Anthony Shabbat), his anger at his father, and his guilt about near-killings in his childhood could all be the causes.

At times, Desmond is like the American soldier's version of Eric Riddle, a runner in Chariot of Fire, who won the gold medal despite refusing to run on Sunday. He's an unarmed pacifist, but he'll find ways to be a war hero, even if he's a paramedic. He had no shred of neurosis, and he was much more comfortable on the battlefield than the soldiers he cared for.

Gibson approached familiar subjects in a steady manner—Desmond's ordeal at boot camp, his struggle to win the respect of his comrades. The barracks scenes are both humorous and tragic. Garfield has the toughness of a Popeye, recovering from every humiliation and setback, and miraculously his sense of humor is miraculously intact. Vince Vaughan and Sam Worthington play tough but impartial cops in the film, causing him a lot of trouble.

Here, sometimes we feel like we're watching John Ford's old movies, full of rhetoric, machismo, and sentimentality. However, the scenes in Hacksaw Ridge have a bloody, hallucinatory feel to themselves, far more terrifying than any scene from Ford. Gibson doesn't seem to know whether he wants to bring us to the end of the world or present real history.

In the face of chaos, the tone of the film is still unusually optimistic. What astonished Desmond was not only his heroism, but also his inner conviction that, like those who had shed blood, believed that what had happened was logical and there was hope for redemption. He was the only one who had the slightest sympathy for his enemies.

Hacksaw Ridge may seem unlikely to happen in real life, but it's based on a true story. It is a testament to Gibson's ability to direct films full of blood and extreme pain — also reflected in The Passion of the Christ and The Book of Revelation. Although the film is full of ominous signs and sometimes heavy symbolism, the energy of the film is well matched by Garfield's performance. Gibson's achievement is that he has made an uplifting, optimistic film, and the theme of the film is very cold, and these two contradictory properties are combined to make this film both shocking and cruel, which can be said to be a very classic war movie.