Comparison to Hacksaw Ridge

Hi all,

I just now made a post on the Hacksaw Ridge discussion board hoping to start some kind of discussion about the relationship between these two movies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2119532/board/thread/265625061). I thought I'd post it here too to see what you all who have seen both have to say. I've copied it below -- just keep in mind that everywhere I say "this movie" I mean Hacksaw Ridge:

"I just thought I'd set out an area for people to discuss this movie's relation to Silence, the Scorsese movie with a lot of thematic similarities (plus Andrew Garfield). I went into Hacksaw Ridge after watching Silence about two weeks before, not knowing anything about the former other than it was a WWII drama with Gibson at the helm. Because the ideas at Silence's core are never away from the action, they were present in my mind when watching Hacksaw. I began to ask Hacksaw Ridge a lot of the same questions that Silence presents; whether or not that's a fair test can be a point of discussion.

With this constant comparison in mind, afterwards I felt like the exchange of ideas in Hacksaw Ridge loses steam after the first hour. It indisputably answers the question of Doss' faith about 100 minutes in, with about 39 minutes of action to go -- "he was right the whole time about his pacifism, now here's some explosions." I thought that after Doss saw some action the movie might go deeper with the question of Doss' faith: is it not arguable that his fellow soldiers are using violence to protect him, and by not using a gun himself he's effectively forcing other soldiers to "sin" on his behalf? Silence asks such questions of Garfield's priest character throughout, where here Gibson pulls his punches.

So while by now it is obvious that I left Hacksaw Ridge more partial to Silence, I'll open it up to discussion. Is my comparison of Hacksaw to a three hour passion project by one of the best American directors fair? Does Hacksaw Ridge have more nuance or interesting commentary (whether on the nature of faith or not) that I'm missing? Are there reasons why Hacksaw was given more Academy love than Silence? (On this last question I am more interested in reasons regarding the quality of the movies themselves and not as much on external/political reasons, but the latter is also welcome).

Any other interesting points to make when discussing these two movies about faith together?What do you think?"