Hacksaw Ridge

So that's eight Best Picture nominees down, one to go for me. (Fences, soon enough!)

This was, simply put, a tale of two movies. Like Full Metal Jacket before it, this felt like two entirely different movies. Except unlike in Full Metal Jacket, this time around the first half is weak as hell and the second part's the memorable one.

The first half of Hacksaw Ridge was just awful - stilted, weird, unbelievable, and with a big dramatic arc that resolves itself when Andrew Garfield's shitty father comes through in the clutch to prevent him from getting court marshaled. The premise here is interesting enough - a deeply religious conscientious objector enlists in the Army because he's not afraid to die for his country; he just won't kill for it. His CO's and peers are, naturally, ripshit at the idea of fighting alongside a medic who would refuse to kill anyone in the heat of battle. But the execution just makes the protagonist look like this smarmy little dipshit, laughing at the very idea of being violent in the midst of, you know, war.

Then the second half comes and and all of a sudden we're up close and personal with the Battle of Okinawa and Hacksaw Ridge is one of the nastiest and most brutal war movies I've ever seen - maybe the goriest (discounting, you know, 300 and its ilk), definitely the most harrowing. And Andrew Garfield, this grinning "over it" religious bumpkin, is risking life and limb to save literally dozens of wounded soldiers, one by one, after an assault on Hacksaw Ridge goes awry.

The last war movie to be nominated for Best Picture was American Sniper a few years back, and frankly, I thought that one sucked ass. Not only because it was a boring movie - though that's certainly part of it - but because its deep red politics sucked loads of ass. "There are wolves and there are sheep, and my fellow soldiers are all sheep, and the wolves are out to kill them, so I will kill wolves in order to save sheep," was the basic mindset of Chris Kyle. There was no room for ambiguity there; the people resisting invasion were bad, and had to be put down like rabid dogs.

This movie almost feels like a direct rebuttal to that one. Because really, what's more heroic? Having  hundreds of confirmed kills on your record, or saving several dozen people without so much as wounding any on the other side?

In the end, I liked Hacksaw Ridge. It moved me. But it's only half decent, in the sense that half of it is this awful unwatchable cheese.