Hacksaw Ridge

Dir: Mel Gibson

2016

**

Hacksaw Ridge tells the story of Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist who refused to carry a rifle during the Second World War. Doss was a pacifist and a conscientious objector but still signed up when America joined the war to do his duty, specifically requesting to work as a combat medic. He single-handedly saved over a hundred lives without once picking up a gun and firing. His stand was quite symbolic, military training is a form of control and conformity, and as much as we might not like it, it works, so to be a conscientious objector, refuse orders and somehow serve unarmed was understandably seen as dangerous. His fellow solders gave him a hard time and he narrowly avoided receiving a court marshal. However, his stand marked a stand for civil liberties, he served his unit well, saving over one hundred lives during fierce battle at Okinawa, where the only access to the Japanese barricades were up the Maeda Escarpment, known as ‘Hacksaw Ridge’. He was the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Medal of Honour and is the epitome of the word hero. Audie Murphy, a fellow Medal of Honour recipient and Western star tried to make a film about Doss in the 1950s, as did Hal B. Wallis who produced classics such as Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and True Grit. In fact Doss, a modest man, turned down many requests for book and film versions of his actions, because he was wary of whether his life, wartime experiences, and Seventh-day Adventist beliefs would be portrayed inaccurately or sensationally. Doss' only child, Desmond Doss Jr., stated: "The reason he declined is that none of them adhered to his one requirement: that it be accurate.” So who did the financiers hire to direct when they eventually acquired the right to his story? Mel Gibson. The man who made a historical film that featured two men who were born a hundred years apart (Braveheart) and told the ‘true story’ of The Patriot, painting him as a family man and war hero, even though he was a murderer and rapist. That spinning sound you can hear is poor Doss turning in his grave. Doss finally gave the rights to his story to Gregory Crosby (grandson of Bing Crosby) who wrote the treatment and brought it to Permut Presentations who financed the film through Stan Jensen, a high-up member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Terry Benedict won the rights to make a documentary about Doss called The Conscientious Objector and secured the rights for a dramatized version in the process, which he sold after Doss’s death in 2006. The rights crossed many people’s hands and there were arguments about how the film should be made, Bill Mechanic acquired and then sold the rights to Walden Media who developed it with Permut Presentations. It became clear that the story was leaning towards an Adventist agenda and when Mechanic heard that it was going to show a PG-13 version of the war, he spent years trying to buy the rights back. He managed in the end and hired Gibson as he wanted him to create a concoction of violence and faith, as he did with The Passion of the Christ. It all seems a million miles away from what Doss himself would have wanted. The development hell didn’t end there, the film became an international co-production between the US and Australia and when the production lost its tax incentives the production team had to hire an almost entirely Australian cast and crew. David Permut stated that they took great care in maintaining the integrity of the story, since Doss was very religious but much of his story was changed. His father’s backstory was changed, painting him as abusive towards his mother and in one scene showing him pointing a gun at her head, when the truth was he once had a drunken fight with his brother and pointed a gun at him. There’s a big difference. It also played down Doss’s prior combat service and completely changed the circumstances of his first marriage. Doss met his wife when she came to his church selling Adventist books and not in a hospital, indeed, she became a nurse after the war and he didn’t miss their wedding day as was shown in the film. The battle scenes were actually written by Gibson, who said they were influenced by nightmares he had during childhood after his father, a WW2 veteran, described the horrors he witnessed as bedtime stories. The truth is that Doss wasn’t even the first conscientious objector to be awarded the Medal of Honour, he was actually the third. The overall idea of what he did is sort of in the film but this isn’t his story at all, it is everything he didn’t want a film of his life to be. There were aspects of Doss story left out of the film as they were considered too unbelievable, such as when Doss stepped on a grenade to save his buddies and was hit by shrapnel, but as he was being carried away by medics he saw another soldier hurt; since Doss himself was a medic he jumped off his stretcher and treated that soldier and told the medics to take care of other wounded soldiers; he then crawled back to safety while being shot at by enemy snipers. Also, while lowering men down the ridge, a Japanese soldier had Doss in his sights several times, and every time he did, his gun jammed, preventing him from shooting him. I understand why they would leave these facts out but I don’t know why they would be replaced by seeing a solder using the limbless corpse of a dead comrade as a shield, or watching Doss shower as if in a shampoo commercial. The battle scene features the Wilhelm Scream for goodness sake, I found much of it quite appalling. It wasn’t the level of violence or gore that disgusted me, I’m all for showing war for all its bloody realism, what I took umbrage to was the bloody unrealism. Dunkirk has shown the modern war film what to be, so I’m hoping that Hacksaw Ridge is the last war film of its kind. It thinks it is anti-war but it’s not, and it does a great disservice to a great for financial and religious gain. Andrew Garfield is good in the lead role and I thought Hugo Weaving was exceptional in his performance, it’s just a shame that their characters were fictional, when the real people they were performing were interesting enough without the need of a rewrite.