Hacksaw Ridge Review

Matt Zoller Seitz called Hacksaw Ridge a movie at war with itself, and the description fits its structure. The first half, in Lynchburg, Virginia and basic training, is Sunday-school Americana: a courtship with a nurse, a father ruined by the last war, a drill sergeant played for laughs by Vince Vaughn, and a court martial that never happened in real life.

Then the company climbs the cargo nets onto the escarpment and Gibson stages combat as brutal as anything since Saving Private Ryan, bodies torn open, men burning under napalm. Simon Duggan's camera never loses the geography, and Kevin O'Connell won his first Oscar, after 21 nominations, for the sound mixing. Andrew Garfield, Oscar nominated, plays Doss as gentle and immovable, and the night he spends lowering wounded men down the cliff one by one, praying to get one more, is the film's best passage and its whole argument.

The piety is laid on thickly, and several critics objected that the Japanese soldiers are mostly faceless and screaming. It won Oscars for film editing and sound mixing from six nominations, including Best Picture, and marked Gibson's return to directing ten years after Apocalypto.