I haven't updated it for a long time, because I recently went to Japan for many days to buy some vinyl records. When I came back, I saw this "Hacksaw Ridge", this piece is really too hard, and my teeth hurt. After watching this film, I feel a lot, but most of it has nothing to do with the film itself, and I just want to say something off-topic related to this film.
1 Welcome to Battlefield Hell
"Hacksaw Ridge" has been warmly welcomed by our domestic audiences, and to a large extent, the film nakedly shows the cruelty of war. In the movies and TV series released in our country, it is rare to put the battlefield scene on the table so bluntly.
Unlike some domestic god films, the combat heroes in it were shot more than a hundred times, not only did not break their arms and legs, but also said ten minutes of last words, and by the way, the party fee was returned. In Hacksaw Ridge, any scene is in line with physical and physiological principles: under the strafing of the machine gun, the human body is easily shattered; the explosive air wave will shake people apart; the torso is easily explained; the battlefield is full of human fragments...
Inadvertently, this American film has taught us Chinese anti-war lesson. This kind of crunchy death, can't move the brain shell flying scene, let many young audiences frightened, is bound to break the war fantasy of many people, which is a good thing.
But this anti-war lesson was not particularly thorough. Because, the real Pacific campaign is more terrifying and cruel than what is shown in the film. The cruelty of the war scene is divided into two layers, one is the blood and death on the physical level, and the other is the psychological level — the collapse and madness after experiencing hell. Hacksaw Ridge depicts the cruelty of the first level very well, but obviously does not depict the second level too much.
The remains of a Japanese soldier who committed suicide
This suicide plane called "cherry blossom bomb" is a unique trick of the Japanese army, in fact, it is a bomb operated by someone, as long as it goes up, whether it can blow up the US army or not, it will undoubtedly die
If you just look at the statistics about the war, you always feel that you are separated by layers of veils and cannot be restored to the scene. Tell you a few small examples that are difficult to see in the grand historical narrative, so that everyone can feel the cruelty of the Pacific War.
Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush was a pilot during the Pacific War. In 1944, Bush's comrades-in-arms flew several planes to bomb the islands held by the Japanese, and all of them were shot down by the Japanese. The elder Bush died a big life, fell into the sea, drifted in the Pacific Ocean for a long time, encountered the American ship, was saved, became a legendary war hero, halo added, and gave birth to Bush Jr. in 1946. And the bad-luck pilot comrades were all captured by the Japanese, and four of them were eaten by the Japanese, to be precise - barbecue. Fate is sometimes a really elusive thing.
The suffering of bush's comrades-in-arms was not isolated, because the Pacific theater was too cruel and food shortages, and the Japanese army ate people in the Pacific theater and became a common thing. The great writer Ooka Shengpei, in his famous book "Wildfire", described in detail the case of Japanese soldiers approaching madness and even cannibalism. The Japanese scholar Tanaka Korisato also released a lot of internal Japanese cannibalism files, such as a 1944 ban on soldiers eating people issued by the head of the 41st Army of the Japanese Army, but it also wrote: Eat the flesh of the enemy army without punishment.
Wildfire is a famous Japanese war reflection novel that has been adapted to the screen many times in Japan, the upper picture is the 1950s Ichikawa Kun version, and the bottom picture is the 2014 version of Tsukamoto Shinya.
But remember, war is hell. The war turned the Japanese into zombies, but that didn't mean that Americans who also experienced the brutal scene would not be in hell. Paul Fossel wrote in his book War Time that dealing with corpses and death all day long could easily drive these young soldiers crazy. There was a slang term in the Pacific Theater at the time, and the U.S. lieutenant general referred to people who were slightly mad and mentally disturbed by the brutal war as "rock happy."
The cruelty of war made rock happys toy with and collect enemy bones as entertainment, and in 1943 a reporter from the magazine "The Yank" came to Guadalcanal for an interview, and a rock happy soldier showed his collection like a reporter: two Japanese officers whose heads had been chopped off, laughing about how he stabbed them to death with a Japanese saber and beheaded them. The reporter thought he was crazy, but the officer next to him shrugged and said in French, "c'est la guerre" (this is war).
In their letters home, the soldiers would downplay the spoils of war: "Do you want the skeleton of a Japanese devil?" ”。 For these trophy skeletons, the U.S. military will often give them the nickname of their hometown: Sam, Charlie, Oscar, etc., and give them to relatives and friends as souvenirs such as ashtrays and candlesticks. The most exaggerated thing is that an officer collected a sack of skulls in Guadalcanal, ready to be made into a souvenir for relatives and friends. Another Pennsylvania lawmaker gave President Roosevelt a letter-opening knife made of a Japanese soldier's shoulder blade.
In 1944, a U.S. Navy with his Japanese collection
This photograph is of the week's photograph published in Life magazine in the United States in May 1944, in which a Phoenix wartime worker named Natalie Nickson writes a letter to her boyfriend who served in the Navy to thank him for sending the skeleton of a Japanese soldier, which he is said to have collected as a trophy during the battle in New Guinea.
In fact, at the end of World War II, both the Axis and the Allies went crazy and were in a state of psychological collapse, such as Comrade Stalin. This kind of case of internal alienation because of war exists in all countries that are defeated and victorious. Yet these facts are drowned in grand historical narratives.
2 Rare retro war perspectives
The reason why "Hacksaw Ridge" does not focus too much on the distortion of human nature in war is because the focus of this film is very unique.
Speaking of the biggest features of "Hacksaw Ridge", some friends said that this film is unique in filming the fierceness of the Japanese army, unlike the domestic anti-Japanese drama, the Japanese are mentally retarded, idiotic, and incompetent. In fact, starting from the "Battle of Iwo Jima" starring John Wayne in the fifties, when American movies depicted the Pacific War, the image of the Japanese army has always been fierce. Only in the Iwo Jima Family Letter, the old cowboy Eastwood recounts the Pacific War from a Japanese perspective, with a slightly human side. On the contrary, the Japanese in this film seem to be like a background, and the face is not clear, not even dialogue. Inside, the Japanese commander-in-chief Ushijima Man, this film only gives a shot of the abdomen cutting, not even a line.
Blood Battle of Iwo Jima, 1950
Although the scene of this film is real and cruel, it is not its biggest feature. Everyone is so shocked by this movie, on the one hand, it is rare to show the cruelty of the battlefield so bluntly in the movies that have been released publicly in recent years. But back in the late 1990s, in "Saving Private Ryan," this brutal scene in Hollywood movies was on full display. And as an aside, the most realistic and cruel war movies, I think, are Russians and Eastern Europeans, but films from these countries rarely enter the field of vision now, so they are easy to ignore. If you don't believe it, you can watch a Russian movie that reflects the war in Chechnya - "Purgatory".
purgatory
In fact, I think the biggest feature of Hacksaw Ridge is that its observation perspective is extremely unique - neither an ordinary soldier nor a high-level officer, but a religious saint to view World War II. Therefore, this film does not introduce much about the historical background and political background at that time, but is full of a large number of straightforward religious metaphors: for example, the male protagonist was very violent when he was a child, injured his brother, and there was a picture of Cain killing Abel in the film, and the male protagonist was inspired to embark on the road of non-violence; at the end of the film, the male protagonist successfully saved people, a beam of holy light shone on him, and all glory was attributed to God. Therefore, there is basically no alienation of human nature by war in this film, and the conflict of ideas is all focused on adhering to faith. Although the war scenes are bloody, they are not cruel at the ideological level, and even contain emotional pulses, relying on religious beliefs to shine on the cruel battlefield.
This kind of values and perspectives is extremely retro and old-school. So much so that when I watched this film, I thought I had watched a movie from the 1940s. In 1941, the United States released a movie called "Sergeant York", which is very similar to "Hacksaw Ridge", in which the hero is also a devout believer, because of religious beliefs, he refuses to kill, but finally becomes a war hero story. At the heart of that film is also religion, faith, and holy light. This classic war sermon movie also became a successful conscription propaganda film at that time.
Released in 1941, "The Cobia of York" is also a war film with religious themes.
But as long as you know director Mel Gibson, you must know that he is an ultra-conservative and religious person, and preaching and depicting cruel scenes are his two major hobbies. So choosing this true story to make a movie and preaching at scale is what he is best at.
3 The meaning of war and today's choices
It is because the war is too cruel. This retelling of history is to find meaning, and different directors have different choices.
Some directors think that war is cruel and irrational. For example, Kubrick's films have appeared in the Roman Wars, Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II (flashing a moment in the clockwork orange), the fantasy U.S.-Soviet nuclear war, and the Vietnam War. The wars inside are all black and ridiculous, culminating in Full Metal Shell.
Some directors focus on the destruction and alienation of people's hearts by war, such as Oliver Stone's "Deer Hunter" and Coppola's "Apocalypse Now".
Apocalypse Now is my favorite war movie, probably because I love the Dark Heart novel too much
Some directors want to reflect on war from the perspective of human intercommunication and from the different perspectives of the warring sides, such as Eastwood's famous "Iwo Jima Family Letter" and "Father's Banner".
Conversely, in Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson's unusually firm attitude in this film is the most conservative set of propositions in the United States (conservatism here is not a pejorative term): brave, determined, hard-core, and loving God. Mel Gibson's ambition and thrust in making this film is a sentence from the protagonist: The world is falling apart, and I want to bridge him.
This ambition is not only to recount World War II, but also to look to the future. Today's world is also in an undercurrent of turmoil and contradictions, and Mel Gibson wants to face it with this traditional value. And "Blood War" also set up a pompous character who looked like Clark Gable, nicknamed "Hollywood", and later scared on the battlefield. This is Mel Gibson's little cunning, intended to bluntly express that Hollywood today's set is flashy, weak and feminine, and cannot withstand the test.
This is also a reflection of a conservative trend of thought that is emerging in today's American society, so "Hacksaw Ridge" has received super strong praise in the United States, and many people have wept bitterly. And the taste in "Blood War" is very similar to Trump's campaign slogan: Let America be great again, like a stimulant stuck in the American people.
Interestingly, "Billy Lynn", which was released on the front and back feet of "Blood War", portrayed a confused warrior. In that film, the purpose of the US war on terror is unknown, the soldiers are confused, and the people are full of contradictions and prejudices. Although "Billy Lynn" does not have a particularly large number of cruel war scenes, it is real, cold, and full of contradictions, putting the rifts and ideological anxieties of American society on the face, and it is not flattering in all directions, and even angers the nerves of many Americans.
Two soldiers, one determined and one confused, the two protagonists correspond to the two tastes and two currents of thought in the United States.
Therefore, it is really interesting that the films of these two films appear at the same time. We can take the present as a coordinate to see how these two lines of thinking in the United States extend and collide in the future. I bet I'll see it.
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