The film is a bit of a mess.
It tries to hide that mess behind an unassailable righteousness of valiant service to the state, but if you take in all of what Hacksaw Ridge puts out there, that sloppiness shows through.
It's largely just another exercise in pushing all the "right" buttons to create something designed to get and keep your butt in that seat. And that's OK, as long as you understand that's what you're watching.
Bright notes: There is some good stuff in the flick; glimmers of good writing and scenario work. In general, the interactions between the lead and his fellow trainees and "betters" in the barracks was a passable stretch of decent film writing, directing, acting.
But too many balls get dropped. This largely shows up in scenarios where folks have to get down to speaking the truth about things. A good example of this is the court martial scene, where the writing and sequencing is muddied to the point where you feel a little insulted the writers figured you wouldn't notice.
Yes, there's all that interminable battlefield action, and indeed it does make it difficult to hold a narrative product up to artistic standards while men are being blown to smithereens at a mile a minute.
But... in the end, it *is* a movie. And it *does* all too often seem to want to hide a paucity of honest scenario work behind its sundry blockbuster bonafides, like the man-faces-death thing and the boy-meets-girl thing.
I suppose where this all comes from is... this is sometimes what you get when you have to stretch one basic--and interesting, surely!--story idea over a two-hour run-time.
You can riff off that one story in interesting ways, but in the end you're really just watching one story idea being developed. Whether the exercise was worthwhile comes down to how the writers (and downstream production participants) made things come alive in spite of that "limitation".
I'm saying I was a little surprised to see such an otherwise *very* well-meaning enterprise--telling Desmond's story--drop too many balls and produce something marred with a certain amount of artlessness.
It tries to hide that mess behind an unassailable righteousness of valiant service to the state, but if you take in all of what Hacksaw Ridge puts out there, that sloppiness shows through.
It's largely just another exercise in pushing all the "right" buttons to create something designed to get and keep your butt in that seat. And that's OK, as long as you understand that's what you're watching.
Bright notes: There is some good stuff in the flick; glimmers of good writing and scenario work. In general, the interactions between the lead and his fellow trainees and "betters" in the barracks was a passable stretch of decent film writing, directing, acting.
But too many balls get dropped. This largely shows up in scenarios where folks have to get down to speaking the truth about things. A good example of this is the court martial scene, where the writing and sequencing is muddied to the point where you feel a little insulted the writers figured you wouldn't notice.
Yes, there's all that interminable battlefield action, and indeed it does make it difficult to hold a narrative product up to artistic standards while men are being blown to smithereens at a mile a minute.
But... in the end, it *is* a movie. And it *does* all too often seem to want to hide a paucity of honest scenario work behind its sundry blockbuster bonafides, like the man-faces-death thing and the boy-meets-girl thing.
I suppose where this all comes from is... this is sometimes what you get when you have to stretch one basic--and interesting, surely!--story idea over a two-hour run-time.
You can riff off that one story in interesting ways, but in the end you're really just watching one story idea being developed. Whether the exercise was worthwhile comes down to how the writers (and downstream production participants) made things come alive in spite of that "limitation".
I'm saying I was a little surprised to see such an otherwise *very* well-meaning enterprise--telling Desmond's story--drop too many balls and produce something marred with a certain amount of artlessness.