Hacksaw Ridge

Due to the local cinema being both cheap and excellent, I've probably caught more new flicks on the big screen over the past two years than I have in the past two decades. Mercifully we've had some great films in that time.
Trouble is - and I don't know if I'm alone here - I suspect this has resulted in a case of, often as not, outlining some kind of bombastic blog entry or FB scribbling for an imaginary audience in the never-ceasing delusional quest of self-aggrandisement.
Such is definitely the case with Hacksaw Ridge. I was judge and jury long before I even went this afternoon. If only for my own political and all too pompous and elitist reasons.
So why is it that I'm still asking myself, "Was it more than just a couple of hours of nu-school war porn?".
The bowel loosening viscera and horror is all there. The straight ahead Jobian tales of conviction and Sisyphean anguish are intact. As are all the obligatory tropes and characters. Was it even a good film? Or an important one? Truth is, I can't answer any of these questions. I can only say that in spite of it all, I'm of the mind that it really was something richer.
Just shy of twenty years ago, I went and saw Saving Private Ryan with Jake and his dad. Mister Jake was in Signals in the New Guinea campaign. Must have been nearly half an hour of silent waves of weeping after the flick before he could find his throat again. And then, to cover the tracks of the tears he added, "Of course WE (the Australian 6th and 7th Divisions) would have softened the defences up for a few days, not a few hours." And who was I to tell him that the movie was merely taking liberties for the sake of narrative? He was there and I wasn't. But in that half hour, he was a twenty year old kid again, shaken but perhaps finally vindicated. I learned later that that movie, for all its stereotypes, had freed up a lot of souls who had been emotionally crippled for over half their long and damaged lives, so more power to it.
I wonder then, if it's too optimistic to say that like Band of Brothers I suspect I see Hacksaw Ridge as a love letter to a courage and madness most of us should never hope or need to know.
Heartfelt hats off to all the local talent for making a war film like few others.

Fighting and falling...