Film Review: ‘Hacksaw Ridge’. The real hacksaw ridge

Film Review: ‘Hacksaw Ridge’

Mel Gibson has made a movie about a pacifist who served nobly during WWII. It’s a testament to his filmmaking chops, and also an act of atonement that may succeed in bringing Gibson back.

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Mel Gibson’s “Hacksaw Ridge” is a brutally effective, bristlingly idiosyncratic combat saga — the true story of a man of peace caught up in the inferno of World War II. It’s the first movie Gibson has directed since “Apocalypto,” 10 years ago (a film he’d already shot before the scandals that engulfed him), and this November, when it opens with a good chance of becoming a player during awards season, it will likely prove to be the first film in a decade that can mark his re-entry into the heart of the industry. Yet to say that “Hacksaw Ridge” finally leaves the Gibson scandals behind isn’t quite right; it has been made in their shadow. On some not-so-hard-to-read level, the film is conceived and presented as an act of atonement.

It should be obvious by now that the question of whether we can separate a popular actor or filmmaker’s off-screen life from his on-screen art doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all answer. Every instance is different. In the case of Mel Gibson, what we saw a number of years ago — first in his anti-Semitic Комментарии и мнения владельцев, then in leaked recordings of his phone conversations — wasn’t simply “objectionable” thoughts, but a rage that suggested he had a temperament of emotional violence. It was one that reverberated through his two most prominent films as a director: “The Passion of the Christ,” a sensational and, in many quarters, unfairly disdained religious psychodrama that was a serious attempt to grapple with the stakes of Christ’s sacrifice, and “Apocalypto,” a fanciful but mesmerizing Mayan adventure steeped to the bone in the ambiguous allure of blood and death.

Like those two movies, “Hacksaw Ridge” is the work of a director possessed by the reality of violence as an unholy yet unavoidable truth. The film takes its title from a patch of battleground on the Japanese island of Okinawa, at the top of a 100-foot cliff, that’s all mud and branches and bunkers and foxholes, and where the fight, when it arrives (one hour into the movie), is a gruesome cataclysm of terror. Against the nonstop clatter of machine-gun fire, bombs and grenades explode with a relentless random force, blowing off limbs and blasting bodies in two, and fire is everywhere, erupting from the explosions and the tips of flame-throwers. Bullets rip through helmets and chests, and half-dead soldiers sprawl on the ground, their guts hanging out like hamburger.

Yet at the center of this modern hell of machine-tooled chaos and pain, there is Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a soldier who refuses to carry a gun because it is against his values. He’s a conscientious objector who acts as a medic. But because he’s every bit as devoted to serving in the war as he is to never once firing a bullet, he isn’t just caring for soldiers. He’s on the front lines, in the thick of the thick of it, without a weapon to protect him, and the film exalts not just his courage but his whole withdrawal from violence.

There really was a Desmond Doss, and the film sticks close to the facts of his story. Yet there’s still something very programmatic about “Hacksaw Ridge.” It immerses you in the violent madness of war — and, at the same time, it roots its drama in the impeccable valor of a man who, by his own grace, refuses to have anything to do with war. You could argue that Gibson, as a filmmaker, is having his bloody cake and eating it too, but the less cynical (and more accurate) way to put it might be that “Hacksaw Ridge” is a ritual of renunciation. The film stands on its own (if you’d never heard of Mel Gibson, it would work just fine), yet there’s no point in denying that it also works on the level of Gibsonian optics — that it speaks, on some political-metaphorical level, to the troubles that have defined him and that he’s now making a bid to transcend.

Will audiences, and the powers of Hollywood, finally meet him halfway? One reason the likely answer is “yes” is that “Hacksaw Ridge,” unlike such landmarks of combat cinema as “Saving Private Ryan,” “Platoon,” or “Full Metal Jacket,” isn’t simply a devastating war film. It is also a carefully carpentered drama of moral struggle that, for its first hour, feels like it could have been made in the 1950s. It’s a movie that spells out its themes with a kind of homespun user-friendly clarity. We see Desmond as a boy, growing up in a small town on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with a drunken abusive father (Hugo Weaving) and a mother (Rachel Griffiths) he’s driven to protect. Early on, Desmond gets into a fight with his brother and hits him in the head with a brick, and that incident, which leaves him reeling in sorrow, is the film’s version of one of those “Freudian” events that, in an old Hollywood movie, form the cornerstone of a person’s character.

It all seems a bit pat, but once Desmond grows up and Andrew Garfield starts playing him, the actor, all lanky charm and aw-shucks modesty, wins us over to seeing Desmond as country boy of captivating conviction. He knows nothing about girls, yet he woos a lovely local nurse (Teresa Palmer) with a fumbling sincerity that melts her resistance. And when the war arrives, he enlists, just like his brother, because he feels he has no choice not to. He’s a Seventh Day Adventist scarred by violence in his family; all of this plays a role in his pacifism, and his patriotism. That difficult dad of his is portrayed by Hugo Weaving as a haunted, complex man: a slovenly lush who tries to keep his family in line with the belt, and even the pistol, but also a decorated veteran of World War I who is desperate to keep his sons alive.

Where is Hacksaw Ridge?

The film revs up its old-fashioned pulse when it lands at boot camp, where Desmond proves a contradiction that no one there — not his fellow soldiers, let alone the officers — can begin to fathom. He’s an eager, good-guy recruit who refuses to pick up a rifle even for target practice; they assume (wrongly) that he must be a coward. For a while, the film is strikingly reminiscent of the legendary Parris Island boot-camp sequence in “Full Metal Jacket,” only this is WWII, so it’s less nihilistic, with Vince Vaughn, as the drill sergeant, tossing off the wholesome version of the usual hazing insult zingers; he looks at Desmond and barks, “I have seen stalks of corn with better physiques.” (Hence Desmond’s Army nickname: Cornstalk.) “Hacksaw Ridge” often feels like an old studio-system platoon movie, but when Desmond’s pacifism becomes a political issue within the Army, it turns into a turbulent ethical melodrama — one can almost imagine it as a military courtroom drama directed by Otto Preminger and starring Montgomery Clift.

The question is whether the Army will allow Desmond, on his own terms, to remain a soldier — a conscientious objector who nevertheless wants to go to war. In a sense, the dramatic issue is a tad hazy, since Desmond announces, from the outset, that he wants to be a medic. Why can’t he just become one? But one of the strengths of “Hacksaw Ridge” is that it never caricatures the military brass’s objections to his plan. On the battlefront without a weapon, Desmond could conceivably be placing his fellow soldiers in harm’s way. His desire is noble, but it doesn’t fit in with Army regulations (and the Army, of course, is all about regulations). So he’s threatened with a court martial. The way this is finally resolved is quietly moving, not to mention just.

And then … the hell of war. It’s 1945, and the soldiers from Desmond’s platoon join forces with other troops to take Hacksaw Ridge, a crucial stretch — it looks like a Japanese version of the land above Normandy beach — that can lead them, potentially, to a victory in Okinawa, and the beginning of the end of the war. Gibson’s staging of the horror of combat generates enough shock and awe to earn comparison to the famous opening sequence of “Saving Private Ryan,” although it must be said that he borrows a lot from (and never matches) Spielberg’s virtuosity. Yet Gibson creates a blistering cinematic battleground all his own. Each time the fight breaks out again, it’s so relentless that you wonder how anyone could survive it.

The real story that “Hacksaw Ridge” is telling, of course, is Desmond’s, and Gibson stages it in straightforward anecdotes of compassion under fire, though without necessarily finding anything revelatory in the sight of a courageous medic administering to his fellow soldiers (and, at certain points, even to wounded Japanese), tying their blown-off limbs with tourniquets, giving them shots of morphine between murmured words of hope, and dragging them to safety. In a sense, the real drama is a nobility that won’t speak its name: It’s the depth of Desmond’s fearlessness, and his love for his soldier brothers, which we believe in, thanks to Garfield’s reverent performance, but which doesn’t create a combat drama that’s either scary or exciting enough to rival the classic war movies of our time. This isn’t a great one; it’s just a good one (which is nothing to sneeze at).

Desmond devises a way to save lives by tying a rope around the soldiers’ bodies and lowering them down the vertical stone cliff that borders Hacksaw Ridge, and using that technique he rescues a great many of them. Desmond Doss, who saved 75 men at Hacksaw Ridge, became the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, and Gibson has made a movie that’s a fitting tribute to him (at the end, he features touching footage of the real Doss). But one surprise, given the drama of pacifism-versus-war that the movie has set up, is that there’s never a single scene in which Desmond has to consider violating his principles and picking up a weapon in order to save himself or somebody else. A scene like that would have brought the two sides of “Hacksaw Ridge,” the violent and the pacifist — and, implicitly, the two sides of Mel Gibson — crashing together. But that would have been a different movie. One that, in the end, was a little less safe.

Hacksaw Ridge is a red-state movie about a WWII Hero who won’t touch a gun

Mel Gibson is back, with a complicated, bloody story to tell.

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Alissa Wilkinson covers film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.

Hacksaw Ridge, the first movie Mel Gibson has directed in a decade, is about as Mel Gibson as you can get: grisly, devout, and patriotic, with a deeply complicated core.

Gibson’s wheelhouse, in films from Braveheart and Apocalypto to The Passion of the Christ, is the morally upright, initially reluctant Hero who fights on the side of honor. Usually that fight is a literal battle, the better to unfurl Gibson’s signature torrent of gore. Once, it was a brutal crucifixion.

But the key to all these films is the Gibson Hero, a man of indisputable, uncomplicated virtue, who is at first reticent to engage the enemy. The Gibson Hero is a deeply peaceful man at heart, but when the occasion demands it, he nobly and bravely fights. Hacksaw Ridge is the most clear-cut instance of this template, and one that will play extremely well to the more conservative audiences who also flock to Clint Eastwood movies like American Sniper and Gran Torino.

Given that Hacksaw Ridge is a movie valorizing a Christian man from Virginia who refuses to even touch a gun, that may seem a little surprising. Once you unpack the movie, though, it starts to make sense.

Hacksaw Ridge is genuinely stirring and occasionally corny

Hacksaw Ridge tells the true story of PFC Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield in full aw-shucks mode), the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, given in recognition of his service in the Battle of Okinawa. Doss, whose veteran father (Hugo Weaving) is an abusive alcoholic following his service during World War I, is a Seventh-Day Adventist from the Blue Ridge Mountains. As a young man, he pledges not to touch a gun. But when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, he signs up for the Army anyhow, planning to be a medic — with the loving support of his fiancée, Dorothy (Teresa Palmer).

Doss arrives at boot camp to discover that a soldier who won’t handle a gun isn’t very popular, with either his platoon or his sergeant (Vince Vaughn). Everyone assumes he’s a coward, unmanly, unfit to serve. Doss is the target of jabs and beatings from his fellow soldiers, but he sticks to his guns, so to speak, confident in both his convictions and his commitment to his country; eventually he escapes dishonorable discharge and heads off to war as a medic, without a gun.

At this point, Hacksaw Ridge switches from period drama to full-on war film, and Gibson’s favored aesthetic — which is to say, blood and guts — clicks into gear. It’s kind of a jarring shift, because up to the moment battle begins, Hacksaw Ridge is a fairly straight-ahead World War II drama that feels like it was made by a person who’s watched, and memorized, every World War II drama.

The movie veers into dangerously corny territory, especially in the scene in which Doss first meets his fellow soldiers, each of whom is introduced with his nickname and a sly quip that displays his distinguishing characteristic. This feels so formulaic — as does the romance between Desmond and Dorothy — that I suspect it’s a tactic to lull viewers into complacency, the better to throw the upcoming battle scenes into high relief.

But Doss’s real-life heroism is genuinely awe-inspiring, and so by the end you’re rooting for him, and for the film.

Hacksaw Ridge is the movie Unbroken wanted to be

Watching Hacksaw Ridge, I kept thinking of Unbroken, the 2014 war drama about POW Louis Zamperini. That film shares some DNA with Hacksaw Ridge, largely because both of its main characters battle attempts to break their spirits, but also because religion is a key component of their heroes’ stories.

Unbroken fizzled in its final act. It interpreted Zamperini’s strength as merely the ability to outlast his enemies’ endurance, and expected viewers to find that inspirational. It is, to a point. But the real Zamperini emerged embittered and broken from his time in a prison camp, and it wasn’t until he experienced a religious conversion that he realized that the way forward was to love his enemies. He returned to Japan and forgave his captors in person. That’s the story the book tells, but the film reduces the final act to a few title cards, and thereby loses its arc.

Hacksaw Ridge attempts, and mostly succeeds, to tap into the same audience and thematic material as Unbroken. Clearly targeted at viewers who prize God and country, it gives us a brave and good man — Doss has no flaws, no moments of weakness past his conversion moment — whose insistence on following the dictates of his conscience is his strength, and who derives courage from his faith. Slowly, the people around him come to respect and depend on his faith, even if they don’t share it.

And as I said, it mostly succeeds at its goals. Only a stone-hearted robot could be completely unmoved by Hacksaw Ridge, which tugs relentlessly on your heartstrings at every opportunity.

This is both its strength and its weakness. The score swells a bit too earnestly and the images are shimmery and idealized, a heightened reality that seems like it may belong more to a fairy tale or a fantasy epic than a story about a war in which a lot of people died. (And in contrast to a director like Eastwood, who paired Flags of our Fathers with Letters from Iwo Jima, Gibson isn’t very interested in humanizing the enemy. There’s maybe one moment of recognition that the Japanese enemy soldiers are people with families as well.)

But even if Hacksaw Ridge leaves your heartstrings a little frayed, a man who risks his life to save so many people on the battlefield is undeniably an inspirational figure. In the end, it’s heartening that such men exist, whether or not you share his convictions.

Hacksaw Ridge isn’t about pacifism. It’s about conscience.

The most notable thing about Hacksaw Ridge, though, is Doss’s insistence on nonviolence — not precisely what you expect from a movie that’s obviously intended for the same audience as American Sniper. Doss recoils from even touching a gun. He will not take a life; being a Seventh-Day Adventist, he is even a vegetarian.

At first this seems like a rather revolutionary stance for such a film: A heroic war movie where the Hero is against guns, even in self-defense? When that plot point first emerges, it’s startling. But it gets complicated pretty fast.

For instance, Doss is convinced that his faith is opposed to killing, even on the battlefield. And yet you can’t exactly call him a pacifist (though maybe a pacificist). In many scenes, he allows his fellow soldiers to cover him by returning gunfire. Similarly, in one scene near the end, he doesn’t technically activate a grenade, but he causes it to explode near his enemies — a scene the movie doesn’t interpret as violence, though it destroys life.

But in general, Doss’s stance of personal nonviolence, even if it’s in service of a war, is one of the character’s surprising strengths: He isn’t insisting that everyone conform to his religious standards, just that he must uphold his convictions while pitching in. Some religious pacifists have tended to see their resistance to war as a resistance to the power structures of the state, which conflict with God’s authority. But Doss loves America, and will do what he can to help the cause.

So while at first it seems like Hacksaw Ridge is an anti-gun movie for the Second Amendment-revering crowd, that’s a shallow interpretation. For one, Gibson hasn’t suddenly turned against violence. This is a bloody movie with no sense of scale; it’s not enough that we see one guy’s legs get blown off, but we must see him get dragged across the ground, bloody stumps behind, and then see the same thing repeated four or five times. Pieces of bodies, heads exploding from bullets, guts all over the place — it’s all here, shot with reverence rather than disgust.

Violence, in Gibson’s view, is a glorious aesthetic choice, and Hacksaw Ridge’s violent imagery goes so far and goes on so long as to be completely numbing. It’s the opposite of the effect Gibson presumably intended, making viewers feel the brutality of war. In cases like this, sparseness can be a virtue.

In any case, it’s more accurate to view Hacksaw Ridge as a pro-conscience movie than an anti-gun movie. Its implicit argument is that a free country must make room for principled objectors. Doss is effective precisely because he’s as courageous as any soldier, but he channels his extraordinary courage into his work of saving the wounded. The movie suggests that without him there — without someone who objects to violence in the midst of those who are there to kill — many more soldiers’ lives would have been lost. And so the platoon is in fact fortunate to have a man without a gun among them; his conscience restrains him in some ways and empowers him in others.

This is the basis of some conservatives’ position on matters of religious freedom — that it is to society’s benefit to allow for some to object in order to provide balance and restraint in situations with moral and ethical weight.

Obviously that’s a deeply complicated matter. But whether or not you personally think that position holds weight, it’s certainly reflected in Doss’s story.

So if and when Hacksaw Ridge does gangbusters business at the red-state box office, it would be wrong to mistake that for a spasm of anti-gun sentiment. The movie mixes a Hollywood-style celebration of heroism in a popular setting with a matter of very contemporary importance — and whatever its cinematic faults, it’s hard to emerge from the theater unmoved.

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The real hacksaw ridge

Disclosure statement

Guy Westwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Did You Know That In HACKSAW RIDGE

Partners

Queen Mary University of London provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

The Doomsday Clock offers a countdown to possible global catastrophe and currently reads three minutes to midnight, equal to the threat level seen at the height of the Cold War. Tensions are high in the South China sea and North Korea is developing nuclear weapons. Relations with Russia are fraught and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria drag on and on. With Donald Trump’s finger now on the nuclear trigger the risk of further, possibly apocalyptic war, has risen even higher. In spite of this existential threat, pacifism is a dirty word in the wider political culture. So surely what we need right now is some intelligent articulation of genuine anti-war points of view?

From Jean Renoir’s 1937 pacifist classic, Le Grande Illusion, to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 antinuclear satire, Dr Strangelove, past filmmakers have successfully taken this on, but contemporary film culture has little to offer. Enter Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson’s latest film, which tells the story of Desmond Doss, a religious pacifist who became a US Army medic during World War II.

Although Doss volunteered for the army, he refused to carry a rifle or take life yet still managed to earn a Congressional Medal of Honour for single-handedly rescuing 75 comrades during fierce fighting on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Doss’s story is replete with dramatic progressive potential.

Hacksaw Ridge

But Gibson’s film fails to deliver. Although its first act is focused on Doss’s early life, we learn next to nothing about the tenets of Seventh Day Adventism, the religious faith that informed his worldview. His refusal of violence is depicted as personal rather than principled, a response to specific life events rather than religious reflection and conviction. As such, his position seems to emanate from within rather than belonging to a wider institutional, and potentially oppositional, framework of belief. Here the personal is definitely not the political.

The film also fails to show any convincing contradiction in the military context. The men in Doss’s platoon bully and beat him, and this behaviour is condoned by the army, but these scenes serve only as backdrop to Doss’s stoicism rather than any genuine attempt to show how his beliefs precipitate an institutional crisis. The central court martial scene – which had the potential to explore the ways in which Doss’s principled commitment to his beliefs demanded an uncomfortable and reluctant accommodation of his difference by the military – is pure Hollywood hokum and a lost opportunity.

The film’s battle scenes follow the well-worn groove established by Saving Private Ryan and others; viscera spill and spatter, legs are torn to tattered shreds, and men fall like pins in the face of Japanese machine-gunners. Here the horror of the battlefield is used to set in stark relief the stoicism, selflessness and courage of the American troops.

One would expect Doss’s role in the battle to create contradiction. But instead he becomes a facilitator, servicing the war machine and ensuring it prevails. The technically bravura filmmaking in these scenes has grievous injury, pain and death as a crucible in which the conservative values of family and faith (via Doss and his wife) and firepower (via the resolve of the wider group) are forged.

Conscientious collaborator

To maintain the position of a religious pacifist as enabler of military effectiveness the film does an appalling disservice to Doss’s memory. Doss rescued a number of wounded Japanese troops from the battlefield, dragging them to safety and lowering them down a ridge to be treated by US medics. This inconvenient fact is acknowledged but a casual aside implies that these prisoners were summarily executed, and the audience is solicited to consider this wholly justified.

This choice belies the one-sidedness of the film as a whole, which apes World War II propaganda in its depiction of the Japanese as faceless, insane and animal-like. Indeed, after a number of bloody setbacks, US forces prevail and the scenes of the Japanese being defeated play as revenge. It is hard to imagine anything further from Doss’s belief that violence must be resisted at all costs than these graphic scenes of payback.

Doss’s refusal to bear arms is shown to be a personal choice that doesn’t threaten the wider system. He is a patriot aligned with US war aims who works tirelessly to ensure that the army prevail. And the army is shown to accept, and even defend difference, as long as that difference is thoroughly able to be assimilated.

As a result, the film subsumes a potentially radical anti-war voice within a film that is consonant with the wider racist, nostalgic, militaristic and patriarchal political culture emerging around the figure of Trump. Ultimately, Hacksaw Ridge contains the radical potential of Doss’s story, turning him from conscientious objector to conscientious collaborator, and in doing so reinforces a jingoistic political culture in a time of grave danger.

Hacksaw Ridge

The Bible calls it a burning lake, a blazing furnace. Dante imagined it as nine circles of Sisyphean torture. Bosch colored it with our darkest nightmares. It’s been called Abaddon, Gehenna, Tophet, Hades.

Perhaps those who took part in the Battle of Okinawa have another name for hell: Hacksaw Ridge.

It’s the waning months of World War II. Germany has surrendered but Japan fights on, contesting every inch of land with ferocious tenacity. And as the United States military pushes ever closer to the Japanese homeland, the fighting grows more desperate, more horrific.

The U.S. turns its guns on Okinawa, just 340 miles from Japan. It pounds the island with fire as soldiers and marines scurry ashore. Japanese soldiers hide underground, determined to push the Americans into the ocean. Hacksaw Ridge is one of the island’s most contested points, and soon the ground lies smoking. Bodies litter it like autumn leaves; blood pools in foxholes and footprints; sounds of agony fill the sky. Countries may fight for this patch of land, but it’s Death that rules here. Death that wins.

But into that black, blasted game board scurries one slight, skinny man. He carries no gun: Indeed, he fought the U.S. Army for the right not to. Bandages, not bullets, fill his s. He alone seems to walk upright in this land of crawling, screaming flesh. He alone dares all in this doomscape of the dying.

“Please Lord,” he prays, his clothes soaked in the blood of others, his hands ripped open from the burn of rope. “Let me get one more.”

Desmond Doss finds another man, almost dead—skin torn away, muscles ripped, bone exposed. He gives the man a shot of morphine—American, Japanese, doesn’t matter—and hoists him to his back, returning to the face of a cliff where, below, lies sanctuary. There, at the top of the ridge, he secures the man to a rope and slowly lowers him down, the rope cutting deeper into his hands as he does. Once the man is down, Desmond breathes deep and turns his head again to the smoking ruins of Hacksaw Ridge.

“Please Lord,” he says again. “Let me get one more.”

Positive Elements

Hacksaw Ridge is based on the true story of Desmond Doss, the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor. The character that we meet here is pure, unalloyed Hero.

Like many young men of the day, Desmond took the bombing of Pearl Harbor “personal” and was on fire to volunteer. Even though he could’ve stayed home if he wanted to, Desmond didn’t think it was right to stay behind while others fought in his place.

But Desmond also promised God that he’d never carry a weapon or kill another human being. And as you might expect, that creates a few problems once he and his squad move to the shooting range, preparing for war. Desmond explains to his superiors that he volunteered to save lives as a medic, not take them. And even under threat of a court martial, and despite the pleas of those closest to him, Desmond refuses to violate those personal convictions.

“With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don’t seem like such a bad thing to me to put a little bit of it back together,” he says.

Desmond’s commander, sergeant and the rest of his company find the pacifist soldier’s stance to be peculiar at best, cowardly at worst. But Desmond proves, through his actions at Hacksaw Ridge, that he is no coward.

Spiritual Elements

Desmond’s stance on killing people stems from his deep religious convictions. As a fervent Seventh Day Adventist, he keeps his Saturday Sabbath. He reads his Bible constantly, even asking someone to retrieve it for him from a battlefield. His fellow soldiers sometimes mock him for his piety—sometimes it’s friendly teasing, sometimes more serious—but he never wavers. The closest Desmond comes to a spiritual crisis is amid the battle on Hacksaw Ridge after seeing a close friend die.

“What is it You want from me?” he asks of God. “I don’t understand. I can’t hear You.”

And then he hears the cry of “Medic!” and Desmond knows what he has to do.

[Spoiler Warning] After his daring feats become known, Desmond and his faith become source of inspiration for his fellow soldiers. He violates his Sabbath just once; when his captain, Captain Glover, tells him that a renewed assault on Hacksaw Ridge is planned for Saturday and that the men won’t go without him. Even then, the captain and the rest of the company wait patiently—almost reverently—as Desmond prays for them all.

Desmond’s convictions took root early. A poster featuring the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments adorns the family home. And as a boy, Desmond is particularly drawn to the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” which his mother tells him is the worst sin.

But it’s also clear that other deeply faithful people have come to different conclusions about that commandment. Glover tells Desmond, “I believe in [the Bible] as much as any man.” Desmond’s brother volunteers for the Army and, apparently, has no such anti-weaponry qualms. Dorothy, his love interest back home, cautions Desmond about his stubborn streak: “Don’t confuse your will with the Lord’s,” she says.

Desmond’s mother sings in a church choir. Desmond compares the choir to angels … though not necessarily musical ones. A bombed-out church stands on a bleached battlefield. Someone wears a cross, putting it in his mouth during battle. Desmond recites a portion of Isaiah 40.

Sexual Content

Desmond is attracted to Dorothy from the moment he sets eyes on her, telling his folks that he plans to marry her. He asks her to a movie and, afterward, steals a kiss. She smacks him, telling Desmond that he needs to ask first. But she forgives him and they continue to date. They kiss several more times before they get married. Their wedding night is filmed with restraint. We see Desmond shirtless, and we glimpse Dorothy in a demure white nighty before they kiss and collapse onto the bed, out of the view of the lens.

A member of Desmond’s company likes to go naked. We see his bare backside as he does chin-ups in the buff (as other soldiers rib him about his anatomy). He’s forced to remain unclothed when the company sergeant demands they begin training at that very moment. The guy climbs walls and scrambles through mud in the nude as the sergeant calls him a “exhibitionist degenerate” and seems to ask if he might also be into bestiality. While we never see him unclothed from the front, we do see plenty of his rear.

Soldiers about to go on leave talk about safe sex, condoms and venereal disease. When a fellow soldier spies Desmond’s Bible, he points to another member of the company who (he says) also reads the “Good Book.” The guy holds up a girlie magazine (nothing explicit is seen) and suggests that his reading material is indeed good. One of Desmond’s friends admits he never knew his father—only that it could’ve been one of ten guys. A sergeant tells the troops that their gun should be their “lover, their mistress, their concubine.”

Violent Content

Hacksaw Ridge features some of the most brutal depictions of war ever put to screen. It’s impossible to overstate the level to which we see men turned to meat.

The camera captures dozens, perhaps hundreds of casualties, many of them incredibly gruesome. Sometimes men have bits of their face and bodies chewed off a bullet at a time. Limbs are blown off, and Desmond sometimes carries these soldiers to safety, strips of flesh dangling from their ripped shirt sleeves or pant legs. Corpses litter the ground, their organs exposed and intestines spilled. Two men grapple with each other as one holds a live grenade, which eventually kills them both. Another grenade goes off under a corpse, partially disintegrating it in a shower of blood. Soldiers get bayonetted to death. Several are set alight by flamethrowers or explosions, running or writhing as the flames consume them. One man hangs himself. Another commits ritual suicide—stabbing himself in the gut and drawing the blade across before his assistant beheads him. (We see the blow land and the head fall away from the body.) Countless people try to staunch their own bleeding, screaming in pain. Countless corpses are shown, some being eaten by rats. Japanese soldiers calmly shoot or stab the wounded.

Desmond is attacked in the night by some of his bunkmates, leaving him bloodied and bruised. He’s harassed by Smitty, another soldier, who kicks him in the face during an obstacle-course run, then punches him in the bunkroom, calling him a coward. Desmond’s alcoholic father and a former war veteran, Tom, crushes a bottle of whiskey, cutting his hand. He describes how one of his friends in World War I was killed by a bullet in the back. The wound blasted the man’s internal organs out and, according to Tom, messed up his suit something terrible.

As boys, Desmond and brother Hal fight—Desmond eventually nearly killing his brother by thwacking him in the face with a brick. Tom, was physically abusive, too: Though we don’t see him beat his kids, Tom does struggle with the boys’ mother, gun in hand. As a teen, Desmond bursts into the room where the two are fighting, grabs the gun and nearly shoots Tom (as the dad begs him to pull the trigger). A man working on a truck has the vehicle fall on his leg, puncturing an artery: Blood squirts from the wound before Desmond staunches the bleeding with a makeshift tourniquet.

Crude or Profane Language

To appeal to a faith-based audience, director Mel Gibson reportedly edited out all the f-words and misuses of Jesus name from the film. And indeed, there are none of those to be heard. But plenty of other profanities are heard, including seven s-words and multiple uses of “a–,” “d–n,” “h—” and “p-ss.” We also hear crude slang for the male and female anatomy.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Tom, suffering from what we’d recognize today as post-traumatic stress disorder, is a “drunk,” according to Desmond. Most of the time when we see him he’s obviously inebriated, abusing his family or despising himself. Several soldiers smoke. Desmond injects injured soldiers with morphine.

Other Negative Elements

Soldiers refer to the Japanese enemy as “Nips” and “Japs,” and many seem to believe them to be inhuman monsters. The film does little to humanize them: For the most part, they are indeed seen as almost faceless, heartless opponents—perhaps reflecting how the battle felt to the Americans who took part. Still, it feels jarring today to have a movie spare so little empathy for the soldiers on the other side.

Conclusion

As horrific as Hacksaw Ridge is, the real Battle of Okinawa was perhaps worse. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts in World War II’s Pacific Theater, with more than 14,000 Allied deaths (mostly American), more than 77,000 Japanese fatalities and thousands upon thousands of Okinawan civilian casualties—with some of those civilians used as human shields by the Japanese or encouraged to commit suicide.

Other horrors are also kept from us in the film: The fact that Japan pushed middle school-aged boys into the front lines. In that era, the Japanese believed that death, even by suicide, was preferable to surrender. Okinawa’s horrific casualties reportedly were an important factor in the U.S.’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan instead of invading the Japanese mainland.

Okinawa’s battlefield provides a fitting stage for director Mel Gibson, given his proclivity for violence in his movies. From Braveheart to The Passion of the Christ to Apocalypto, Gibson bathes the screen in blood, often using pain and destruction as a catalyst for stories about freedom and redemption. Gibson, a longtime Catholic, seems to believe quite literally in the saving power of blood.

Which makes Gibson’s selection of his newest on-screen Hero—the conscientious objector Desmond Doss—an interesting one. A director long fascinated by violence tells the story of a man who eschews it. Instead of giving us a Hero who would die for his people, he gives us a Hero who lives—and lives to save others.

Hacksaw Ridge is riveting cinema. But it’s also bloody—as bloody as we’ve seen on screen for a long, long time. And while the horror and gore we see may impress upon us the depth Desmond’s heroism, these images nevertheless assault us with their unblinking depiction of this hellish battle’s carnage.