The man at the heart of the story does not need this sort of grandiosity. It "works," but it's shameless. And the way Gibson has staged the roughest of the Okinawa footage in the second half of "Hacksaw Ridge," weirdly little of it is from Doss' perspective. Gibson may be intellectually compelled by this pacifist in the midst of hell on Earth, but dramatically he's only nominally interested in how it informed every aspect of his life. In any event, Gibson may not be the director to explore the moral horrors of any war, any conflict. He's too interested in physical punishment to make room for much else, though the recurring images of Japanese (symbols of evil, not men) and American soldiers on fire are thematically linked to the all-consuming fire imagery ingrained in the Seventh-day Adventist beliefs.