To hell and back

sible, concentrating on “in-camera effects”, which is to say real explosions using “bomb boxes”, so that the actors react naturally to them, while resorting as little as possible to CGI. Moreover, the camera is right there in the midst: so are you. The battles scenes are comparable to those of Saving Private Ryan but even more horrific. Throughout, the Japanese soldiers seem completely other, a demented tide of evil, justifiably in this context.

Over these initial, almost intolerable scenes, the Lord is calmly invoked (Isaiah 40:28): “Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God. He will not grow tired or weary...” It is one of several moments in this film reminiscent of the work of Terrence Malick, reminding us that it is as much a faith film as it is a war film.

Then we turn back 16 years, to 1929 and Doss’s boyhood in rural Virginia. The movie has a classic three-act structure: home, the rigours of basic training, which for Doss included being court-martialled for his refusal to bear arms, and then the big battle.

Doss’s father Tom (Hugo Weaving, a formidable presence) is a violent, selfloathing drunk, deeply traumatised by service in the First World War. As a boy Desmond (Darcy Bryce) nearly kills his brother Hal in a fight — and gazes in shock at a framed picture of the Ten Commandments including the Sixth, Thou Shalt Not Kill. His father takes off his belt to beat him.

We skip forward 15 years — to Desmond now being played by Andrew Garfield, a great performance of an innocent, almost baffled by his own integrity, faith and courage — much more convincing than his vexed missionary in Martin Scorsese’s Silence.

Seeing a road accident, he uses his belt to improvise a tourniquet, and at Lynchburg Hospital he both meets the angelically pretty nurse Dorothea (Australian actress Teresa Palmer) he will go on to marry, while becoming inspired to serve as a medic himself. Both brothers enlist, to their father’s rage and despair.

At Fort Jackson, Desmond is energetically beasted by his drill sergeant, Howell (Vince Vaughn), who ridicules his reedy physique — “Make sure you keep this man away from strong winds” — not realising his strength, both physical and spiritual. When they learn that, despite enlisting, Desmond is a CO — the real Doss preferred to call himself a conscientious co-operator — his fellow recruits bully and beat him too. “It’s time to quit this,” Howell tells him. But Doss never quits, and at his court martial he is eventually told by the judge that he is free to run under hellfire without a single weapon to protect him.

From here we cut straight to Okinawa and the terrible scenes as his platoon of the 77th Infantry Division try to take the Maeda Escarpment, nicknamed Hacksaw Ridge, against the fanatical opposition of Japanese troops dug deeply into the ground. Calling this visceral is hardly enough: there are both the dreadfully wounded living and corpses everywhere, rats feeding on them.

GIBSON has been accused of being a gorehound, actually relishing this carnage, a predilection evident in his previous films such as Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ. Yet here, in this story of a CO amid this violence, he has adroitly sidestepped that accusation. The film, while being as violent as anything Gibson has done, also, through Desmond’s faith, at the same time abjures it all.

Desmond does eventually touch a rifle — but only to improvise a sled to drag a wounded man away under heavy fire. At one moment he implores God, in that very Malickian mode: “What is it You want of me? I don’t understand. I can’t hear you.” But then a wounded man cries “Help me!” and Doss takes that for his answer, repeatedly praying, “Let me get one more” as he goes beyond what seems humanly possible in getting the wounded off the ridge. Throughout, Garfield completely inhabits his role — it’s far and away his best work.

Hacksaw Ridge is not subtle or ambiguous (and it has a poundingly supportive score, including a deep bass angelic chorus in the loudest battle scenes by English composer Rupert GregsonWilliams). Desmond’s romance with Dorothea is sweetly sentimental — but it needs to be, to stand up to the violence to come. Even when it seems most coarse, there is no denying the film’s impact. (It was, by the way, made entirely in Australia, using many Australian actors strongly adopting American accents.)

Sometimes documentary clips of the real people involved shown at the end of these true stories make slightly uncomfortable viewing, deflating what we have just seen: far from it in Hacksaw Ridge.

In 2004, just two years before his death, a documentary was eventually made about Doss, who was reluctant to appear until that point, and he is extraordinary. “I was praying the whole time, one more, please, let me get one more.” He cleared the eyes of a man who thought he had been blinded. “If I hadn’t got anything more out of the war than that smile he gave me, I’d have been well repaid.”

In his director’s statement, Gibson says: “In a cinematic universe overrun with fictional ‘superheroes’ I thought it was time to celebrate a real one.” He has climbed that mountain.

Reminiscent of the work of Terrence Malick, it reminds us that this is as much a faith film as it is a war film