The Passion of the Christlike: Hacksaw Ridge, reviewed.

Andrew Garfield as conscientious objector and Medal of Honor winner Desmond T. Doss in Hacksaw Ridge. (Lionsgate)

My NPR review of Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson's new movie about World War II conscientious objector and Medal of Honor recipient Desmond T. Doss, is here.

I cut my original lede, figuring y'all know who Gibson is:

Filmmaker Mel Gibson has two obsessions: Grisly violence and martyrdom. Twenty years ago, he won an Oscar for directing Braveheart, a stirring ahistorical epic about a 13th-century Scottish revolutionary who raged against his English oppressors until he was captured and disemboweled. He followed that with The Passion of the Christ, the highest-grossing R-rated film ever made despite having no English dialogue — in his four-star review, Roger Ebert called it “the most violent film I have ever seen” —  and Apocalypto, an 16th century adventure featuring a cast of unknown faces (none white) and more subtitles. By then, Gibson’s keen instincts as a visual storyteller had become as hard to ignore as the hate speech that had begun to spew from his mouth with alarming regularity.