Hacksaw Ridge (2016) - Faith Over Life!

★★★★★

Unlike Clint Eastwood busy directing films even at an old age, Mel Gibson takes his time, but he never seems to lose his touch when it comes to being a director. You wouldn’t disagree at all if you’ve seen his award-winning epic works like ‘Braveheart’, ‘The Passion of the Christ’. Now 10 years later after ‘Apocalypto’, he took the director’s chair again, and pulled off another true-story-based motivational war film, probably the most ingenious one ever since ‘Saving Private Ryan’!

‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is a true story about Andrew Garfield’s Desmond Doss, an American combat medic who saved a great deal of lives during the battle of Okinawa without firing a single bullet. What happens in the film is heroic and encouraging though how it really happened back there may not be presumably so. No matter what, it’s indeed a miracle single-handedly done by a man who has strong faith that he doesn’t have to kill to save lives even in wartime. For such faith, he’s challenged, questioned, threatened, and even beat up and put to trial in order to make him go back home as his comrades think that his refusal to bear a firearm would cause his life and others’ at war. He however, makes it to the battlefield to serve as a medic thanks to his father, and ironically lots of lives are saved thanks to his ‘insanity’ and belief in not carrying a rifle to war.

‘Hacksaw Ridge’ is a great piece of war cinema in years. With Mel Gibson’s directorial efforts, the film’s focused, well paced and told with his signature slow-mo sequences and moving score made to better involve us in the madness of wars and the melancholy of men being obliged to kill and sacrifice without even knowing the real purpose of it. The first half of the film that briefs us how Doss grows up to have such faith is unexpectedly of romance and laughs, but when it comes to the war in the second half, it becomes drastically gruesome and terrifying! The comparison somehow raises our awareness of the hellish and inhumane nature of wars. It also indicates how difficult and crazy it is for Doss to stick to his faith of no-kill under such must-kill circumstances. Yet what seems so remarkably inspirational is that he doesn’t seem to back down or give in to whatever is challenging his faith at all, not even for a second throughout.

What we believe in could differ but the power of faith is universally strong, whether it’s destructive or constructive. Like it’s mentioned in the film, faith’s not a joke. It’s who you are. A miracle happens when you prefer living your faith to your own life. When you’re doing what you believe in no matter what’s trying to stop you, there’ll be no need to pray for a miracle or God to guide you because you’re already a miracle demonstrating God’s will. True that we’re what we believe! Without unshakable faith in not killing, Desmond Doss wouldn’t have possibly performed such a miracle before those questionable eyes. Some may say that Doss was just lucky enough to have done it without getting shot to death right in the first place, but the thing is, luck doesn’t serve as a condition for a miracle to take place. It only comes with it!