Hacksaw Ridge

Slight notch down from them.
I'd give
SPR 10/10
Apocalypto 10/10
FMJ 8/10

Hacksaw Ridge 8.5/10

 

Not a single weapon was reloaded. LAME.

 

Ha! Yeah. Those M1 carbines could fire forever! Heh. But! - at least they got the weapons right. No bayonet lugs on the carbines, no bi-pods on the BARs (at least that's the practice way to use them, sans bi-pod). Vince Vaughn's M3 Grease Gun was a bit of an oddity, but not out of the question.

 

Saw this last week and it's good, but shouldn't be considered to be on the same level as Saving Private Ryan for a variety of reasons. SPR's a classic, Hacksaw Ridge isn't. But all that aside, what I didn't understand was once the troops realized that one man was lowering bodies ALL NIGHT, why didn't a few guys go up there to help?

 

Yeah, I'd agree with your ratings in general as I too think Hacksaw Ridge is very slightly better than FMJ but certainly inferior to SPR and Apocalypto.

 

Maybe. FMJ is still one of my favorite war movies. I think since FMJ feels like 2 different halves of movies (Basic Training, Vietnam,) people give it a markdown on ratings. Though, I admit I think the best part of the movie is the first half of the movie.

How do you rank Platoon amongst those movies?

Platoon is one of my favorites too. I'd probably have to watch Platoon and SPR again to give proper rankings since it's been awhile since I've watched either.

 

I watched it the other night also and while I enjoyed it, the whole training thing bugged me. I couldn't work out why everyone from basic training - including the Captain and the DI - was suddenly assigned to the same combat unit.

 

LOVE MEL always have and always will...HR...F'n Phenomenal.

 

IMO he never lost it and your high hopes will be justified.

 

That was not unusual during WE2.

 

Because unlike the USMC and US Navy, from about 1775 - 1953 that's the way the US Army operated. Who you were mustered with, trained with, or went to AIT with, that's who you went to combat with if you we're in a rifle squad. There we're some exception of course, but that much is realistic.

It was smart, but logistically a pain in the ass. Replacement battalions became a thing around the time of the US Civil War. With the Marines, though, their philosophy was that each man was interchangeable. That had it's problems, too.

 

Platoon is probably the single greatest movie about the Vietnam war, as seen from a grunt's viewpoint. It's also a terrific anti-war movie from a period of film-making that only saw anti-war films. My personal favourite war film of all time (if you will allow it to be classified as such) is Apocalypse Now, which isn't about Vietnam at all. I'm also a fan of Casualties Of War. I watched Platoon recently and it holds up well after all these years but in all honesty it's impact felt a little diluted by the passing of time and it now existing in the shadow of subsequent movies like SPR etc which up the visceral factor considerably.

BTW, I agree with you on FMJ. Like many Kubrick films it is distinctly a film of two halves (or three thirds on some occasions) and the two sections don't always tie together as you might wish. Whilst I have watched it a lot over the years and laughed out loud in the vastly superior first half (great Lee Ermey performance), I don't think it's one of Kubrick's most successful films and it doesn't entirely work for me. Living in the UK, I'm slightly distracted by the sets used for the second half. It was all filmed in the UK (as all Kubricks films were after Lolita?) and sometimes it's difficult to accept parts of the Isle Of Dogs and Norfolk Broads as stand-ins for Vietnam! I wouldn't normally pick anything apart for that but come on, this is a Stanley Kubrick production!

 

Probably for the same reason that nobody, and I mean nobody, had to reload those guns used in Hacksaw Ridge.

 

That's really interesting, thank you. My dad's uncle was in Europe for WWII (he was a part of the fourth wave ashore at Omaha Beach) but by the time I was old enough to converse about this stuff, he no longer discussed it. I'm only now finding out about his experiences in bits and pieces from my dad and uncle.

 

Saw the movie a week ago and really enjoyed the HELL out of it!

Just as an aside, the actress who played the nurse/girlfriend/eventual wife of the corpsman is the very definition of "girl-next-door" PRETTY!

 

Absolute nonsense... that journalist should be fired. The opening scene is basically just a brief montage of battle footage, and not a particularly graphic one, at that. All the graphic stuff comes later, in the second half of the film, during the actual Okinawa scenes.

It's not.... it's about equal to SPR in terms of gore (which isn't gory in the first place, at least by my standards).

 

The film made such a big deal out of the main character having a copy of the bible with him all the time, that during the scene where he gets shot, I was fully expecting the next scene to show that he was totally fine because the bible he was carrying had stopped the bullet!



On a related note, I found that the overly religious nature of the character somewhat lessened the impact of his actions. If he had been determined to rescue his fellow soldiers simply due to bravery, heroism, and/or a genuine concern for his squad mates, that would have been fine. But the fact that he was doing it all because "God told him to" was completely ridiculous. A film loses a lot of credibility for me when it starts in with that kind of nonsense.

 

Hacksaw Ridge seemed choreographed with all the back flips and people (some who were on fire) flying through the air. I've never been in battle, but I've seen some war footage. The flying bodies seemed to be a bit much. With Saving Private Ryan I felt like I was on the beach with the soldiers. I didn't get the same feeling with Hacksaw Ridge.