War….. it’s fantastic!

It is the eve of the 2017 Oscars. The event already looks to be overshadowed with various political speeches by every award winner over “he who must always be Orange”, who recently just started to exclude various media outlets from White House fun with Sean Spicer aka Melissa Mccarthy. But sadly folks, I fell behind with writing up about the various award chasers due to various other real life interests.

But there’s a few that despite not writing about right after viewing, I will get to here over the next week or so. We start off with a surprising return by Mel Gibson, who fresh from going slightly meh some time ago with all that “I hate Jews” talk and other interesting past times, seems to have gotten his head together to give us the story of Hacksaw Ridge. The premise of the whole film revolves around Spider Man who wanted to help in World War 2, but didn’t want to kill anyone because he almost killed his brother with a rock when little. I think.

This of course either angered or sexually frustrated the army dudes (who knows at this point?) and of course despite suffering through all sorts of abuse, he gets to go have fun on the front lines, pulling people to safety and being a hero without ever firing a weapon. It’s a true American hero tale folks, and that is always the type of thing that goes down well with the awards committee at this time.

But even if it wasn’t just realised for shiny shiny, is it any good?

First, let’s go into what this really is. It’s War Porn. Full on War Porn. I’m not even kidding. If you don’t ever want to see people’s legs blown off, guts everywhere and enough blood to drown people in a red tsunami, you’re not going to want to watch this at all. From the start we basically have a slow mo slaughter where we see our hero, Spider Man (Desmond Doss played by Andrew Garfield, who was also in the recent Oscar Bait, Silence. I’ve not watched it yet, so bugger knows how bad that will be….) getting carried away by various boys in green on a bloody battlefield.

Look out, he’s not got a gun!

But that’s when we get the set-up for how Desmond ended up knackered on a stretcher. His brother almost was killed by Desmond with a rock because he’s a nasty little bugger. Agent Smith aka a drunk guy / dad played by Hugo Weaving then tries to discipline his son but the mum saves him. Cut to a few years later and Desmond takes a liking to a nurse who is way too forward about wanting to go out, then do naughty and then finally pester Desmond on when they will get married. But don’t worry she won’t turn up in the film after Desmond goes to war.

After some funny / horrible scenes with Desmond at Boot camp, answering to Vince Vaughan (who is actually pretty good in the film) and getting destroyed over not wanting to carry a gun, off we go to the meat of the film. The blowing up, and mass killing of US and Japanese solders for what seems like an eternity. There are no hold barred with how graphic the gore goes. In fact, Hacksaw Ridge is probably a kind name to call the place they were fighting over. Maybe it should be MegaDeath Gorge?

It takes forever to get to what Desmond actually did, which was to rescue a large number of soldiers by himself in No Man’s Land for hours, risking everything to save others. That in itself is just astonishing that someone did that, and it’s great that they highlighted that fact in this story which unfolded in front of us. We also start taking a liking to some of the characters as time goes on and the reality of war sets in. But really, it started to outlast its welcome and the War Porn parts went on for way too long.

I struggled to remember a lot else about the film aside from the fighting, and one or two choice scenes where they managed to add some humour to the mix. Special effects are of course well done, and the idea shown about Desmond being the first active objector to violence serving in the US military was extraordinary. The overall cast was good too, even if at times they were hemmed into cliches left, right and bloody center.

Would I recommend this to people then? On the big screen for the War Porn, sure. But everything else, wait till Netflix or Amazon start showing it really. Also, don’t eat when watching.