The movie starts with two boys in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, brothers Desmond and Howard Doss, forever competing with each other. Their dad is a World War I veteran who was so traumatized by his experiences in battle that he has become a drunkard and is prone to violence. Desmond realizes his own capability for anger needs to be tamed when he nearly killed his own brother during a childhood fight and when he nearly shoots his dad after beating up his mother.
When World War II erupts, Desmond joins the army with the intention of being a medic, because he shuns violence and refuses to kill other people. While helping someone injured in an accident, he meets a beautiful nurse, Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), in a hospital and they fall in love.
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The ridge is a 400-foot high escarpment that has become a Japanese stronghold and which they must
take back at all cost. And it is here where Doss proves his patriotism and willingness for self sacrifice. Just as his troops are retreating, he keeps on returning to the battlefield, amidst all the shooting and the bombing, to retrieve wounded soldiers by carrying them on his shoulders then lowering them down the ridge by a rope harness he has made using his own hands, to ensure their safety. Records show that he rescued a total of 75 soldiers, including those who earlier humiliated and beat him up for refusing to fight. He's even shown being compassionate to a wounded Japanese soldier.
The battle scenes reminded us of the adrenalin-charged, jingoistic old war movies we saw as a child
soon after WWII, like "Guadalcanal Diary", "Sands of Iwo Jima", "To Hell and Back", "Back to Bataan" and "Paths of Glory". It is also reminiscent of the more recent "Saving Private Ryan" in presenting the horrors and the carnage of war without any reservations.
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Later on, we are shown an interview with real life Doss, now old and wrinkled, and it gives us the creeps somehow when we learn that he died sometime after that interview. The heroism he showed here is not about taking the lives of the enemy, but about saving the lives of the wounded soldiers. His acts of selflessness and decision to stick to his personal convictions helped a lot of the injured soldiers survive the war.
The movie is about the love for peace of the lead character, but the depiction of the brutality of ground warfare here can be very graphic, so the squeamish should be warned. But all in all, this is a film about conviction, love, family and faith that you would not want to miss.
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