![]() ![]() When the action switches to the scaling of the Maeda Escarpment/aka Hacksaw Ridge, the movie becomes perhaps the most grueling war movie experience ever made. After a detour for a court-martial hearing, Doss and his infantry mates are deployed to Japan. Due to his Seventh Day Adventist beliefs, Doss refuses to pick up a rifle, and this gets him into all sorts of jams on the training field and in the barracks. Howell (Vince Vaughn), the film starts to get very interesting. ![]() When Doss goes to boot camp, and faces off against commanding officers like Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) and Sgt. Gibson isn't at his best when he's handling the romance stuff. The early goings on in the film are handled well, although they are a little schmaltzy at times. Much of the film's first half is devoted to Doss's backstory, a troubled childhood with his alcoholic WWI veteran father (a good Hugo Weaving) and an eventual romance with future wife Dorothy Schutte. That didn't stop him from braving the battlefields with comrades, eventually saving the lives of 75 men during horrendously bloody battles. The dude refused to pick up a gun, or any weapon for that matter, during time served in Okinawa. The movie tells the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a WWII battlefield medic and the first Conscientious Objector in American warfare history to receive the Medal of Honor. His depiction of WWII battle makes George Romero's Dawn of the Dead look like Zootopia. Yes, I will go so far as to say his latest, Hacksaw Ridge, is an all out horror film in parts. It bleeds a lot.Īs a director Gibson stands alongside the likes of Sam Raimi, David Cronenberg and Peter Jackson as a master of body horror. Through his outstanding bravery and unflinching determination in the face of desperately dangerous conditions Private First Class Doss saved the lives of many soldiers.Mel Gibson directs his first movie in a decade and surprise the sucker bleeds. With magnificent fortitude he bound a rifle stock to his shattered arm as a splint and then crawled 300 yards over rough terrain to the aid station. Awaiting the litter bearers' return, he was again struck, this time suffering a compound fracture of one arm. ![]() The trio was caught in an enemy tank attack and Private First Class Doss, seeing a more critically wounded man nearby, crawled off the litter and directed the bearers to give their first attention to the other man. Rather than call another aid man from cover, he cared for his own injuries and waited five hours before litter bearers reached him and started carrying him to cover. On 21 May, in a night attack on high ground near Shuri, he remained in exposed territory while the rest of his company took cover, fearlessly risking the chance that he would be mistaken for an infiltrating Japanese and giving aid to the injured until he was himself seriously wounded in the legs by the explosion of a grenade. Later that day, when an American was severely wounded by fire from a cave, Private First Class Doss crawled to him where he had fallen 25 feet from the enemy position, rendered aid, and carried him 100 yards to safety while continually exposed to enemy fire. He applied bandages, moved his patient to a spot that offered protection from small-arms fire and, while artillery and mortar shells fell close by, painstakingly administered plasma. On 5 May, he unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small arms fire to assist an artillery officer. On 2 May, he exposed himself to heavy rifle and mortar fire in rescuing a wounded man 200 yards forward of the lines on the same escarpment and two days later he treated four men who had been cut down while assaulting a strongly defended cave, advancing through a shower of grenades to within eight yards of enemy forces in a cave's mouth, where he dressed his comrades' wounds before making four separate trips under fire to evacuate them to safety. Private First Class Doss refused to seek cover and remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them one by one to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands. ![]() As our troops gained the summit, a heavy concentration of artillery, mortar and machinegun fire crashed into them, inflicting approximately 75 casualties and driving the others back. He was a company aid man when the 1st Battalion assaulted a jagged escarpment 400 feet high. ![]()
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