This stuff feels like a violation of the spirit of Doss' moral code, if not its letter. Gibson shows soldiers using mortar shells as homemade grenades (as in the climax of "Saving Private Ryan"), shifts into glorious slow-motion to showcase a soldier kicking an enemy's lobbed grenade away, and treats us to the surreal and inappropriately comic sight of Doss towing a paraplegic infantryman on a homemade sled while the man cuts down bushels of Japanese soldiers with a sub-machine gun. The combat pays nearly as much attention to the rending, burning and perforating of flesh as it does to the hero's anguish and ingenuity. The second half is set during the Battle of Okinawa, where Doss, who described himself as a "conscientious collaborator" rather than objector, rescued 75 fellow infantrymen injured by the Japanese it feels like an attempt to one-up the D-Day sequence in " Saving Private Ryan," and if sheer bloody explosive nastiness were the only measure, you'd have to declare "Hacksaw Ridge" the winner. Set in Virginia hill country in the '20s and '30s, it's shot in the creamy hues of a Norman Rockwell painting, and filled with earnest, Old Hollywood-styled exchanges about violence and pacifism. Doss ( Andrew Garfield), a Seventh-day Adventist turned U.S. The first half lays out the childhood and adolescence of its hero, Desmond T.
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