As moviemaking goes, Black Hawk Down is a stunning achievement. Director Ridley Scott creates some absolutely chilling shots from the air of hordes of Somalis converging on the small groups of American soldiers, and he stages the combat sequences, especially the helicopter crashes, with excellent intensity and clarity. Like no other movie I’ve seen, it puts you in the middle of a firefight and spares you nothing. This ain’t no blue screen, CGI shit – this is real, physical stuff that you can almost feel: debris flying, explosions knocking people down, missiles screaming past. And Scott doesn’t flinch from the gory realities of combat – in fact, I think he goes a bit too far. It’s like the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan – legless corpses, severed hands, etc. – but for two hours. The horrors of war and all that, but did he really need to show us a medic digging into a man’s gaping thigh wound to find the femoral artery? Yeah, it actually happened, and it’s an amazing testament to the dedication and grit of the soldiers – but couldn’t we have gotten that more subtly? (There’s a reason I don’t watch those operation shows on The Learning Channel.) The movie’s unblinking fascination with what happens when metal hits flesh reminded me of Three Kings – this is not an easy film to watch.
Surprisingly, very few of the actors playing American soldiers are actually American – you’ve got Brits, Scots, Welshmen, Aussies – though you’d never be able to tell from their accents (I was particularly impressed by Ewen Bremner’s seamless transition from Edinburgh yokel to Arkansas yokel). One of the movie's flaws, compared to a movie like Platoon that combined action with three-dimensional characters, is that few actors get enough screen time to make an impression. The film suffers from not fleshing out its characters; instead, it resorts to what could almost be stock footage of soldiers drawing pictures for their kids and calling their wives, and if you've ever seen a war movie, you know that any character who mentions his family at the beginning of the movie isn't going to make it to the end credits.
Australian Eric Bana stands out as lone-wolf Delta Force commando Hoot. Well, perhaps he stood out for me for reasons besides his acting (let’s just say I can’t wait to see him play Dr. Bruce Banner, whose shirt is often either shredded or absent, in Ang Lee’s The Hulk, but I’m perfectly satisfied with his face while I wait), but he also gets most of the philosophical lines, like, “Once the bullets start whizzing past your head, everything else – the politics and all that – goes out the window.” Josh Hartnett begins to atone for his squinty-eyed, open-mouthed performance in Pearl Harbor with a more nuanced and mature portrayal of a “chalk” leader who’s teased by his men for respecting and being interested in the “skinnies,” as they call the Somalis. William Fichtner (the poor man’s Christopher Walken) and Tom Sizemore are good as stalwart veterans (Sizemore takes a bullet in the neck with a look of mild annoyance, reacting as though he’d just been stung by a mosquito).
The movie's taken a lot of flak for depicting the Somalis, by and large, as a faceless enemy, but I'm willing to cut it some slack. It's not exactly breaking Hollywood tradition to show the enemy as faceless and vicious, and it's just geopolitics that the enemy here happens to be non-white. Frankly, I could barely keep the white boys straight (the non-famous ones, anyway), and they even had their names written on their helmets (it gets even more confusing when they run the list of the American dead at the end; some of the names were characters that I'd thought were alive). It's a small screen on which to recreate a complex battle, and the moviemakers can only do so much. They aren't out to make a documentary; they're making entertainment.
That said, from what I’ve read about the movie, it had the potential to be a more complex film that could have posed provocative questions, but clearly the financial powers behind the movie were not interested in making their audience think. Entertainment Weekly and Premiere have interesting articles on the making of the movie (plus a very good special on the History Channel that focused on "the real story" – if they re-air it, I recommend watching it. In addition to its gripping interviews with the men who were there, it provides a clear graphic of the activities: where the helicopters were downed, where the convoy was lost, etc.). If you tease out stray threads in the articles, you get a sense of the tensions behind the scenes. The EW article, for example, quotes Mark Bowden, the author of the book upon which the movie is based, as saying that "Ridley's not interested in making an American patriotic movie and I think [producer] Jerry [Bruckheimer] is, so it's been an interesting dynamic." (I'd like to see the movie Scott wanted to make.) The Premiere piece refers to Ridley Scott as part of a “cabal” that tried to bring key undertones to the story by using Senegalese singer Baaba Maal’s voice as “an unseen observer who represents more of the humanity of the silent Somalis,” in the words of film editor Pietro Scalia. The phrasing makes it pretty clear that undertones of another viewpoint, inserted subtly and secretively, were the most the “cabal” could hope to get through.
By contrast, the EW piece opens with a description of Bruckheimer drooling over the high-tech, actual Black Hawk helicopters (and his own achievement at getting the military to loan him these expensive machines). It’s not hard to read between the determinedly unprovocative lines of the articles to see that Bruckheimer was mainly interested in producing yet another simplistic, jingoistic, explosive-laden blockbuster, à la Pearl Harbor, not in a nuanced examination of, as Scott put it, “Is it right for the biggest entity in the world to be the watchdog for the rest of the world?” (Scott adds, “I don’t have a smart answer,” which is pretty much how I feel, but I wish the movie had done a better job of encouraging that kind of debate).
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the author of the EW piece quotes Bruckheimer, rather than anyone else affiliated with the movie, about the decision to remove a “postscript” tacked on to the movie after Sept. 11 that drew connections between the U.S.’s general lack of intervention in foreign crises after Somalia and the cause of the Sept. 11 attacks. "About half the audience thought we should keep it, and half thought we shouldn't," said Bruckheimer. "And the 50 percent who said to take it out felt pretty strongly... so we took it out."
I’m perfectly willing to see Bruckheimer as the poster boy for the general American disinterest in making connections and extrapolating the consequences of the U.S.’s actions abroad into a larger picture. It seems to me that most of the country has a fundamental lack of curiosity and interest in complexity, period, much less international complexity (I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that so many people – though not a majority – voted for Bush. We get the leaders we deserve – even when we don’t elect them). Most of the U.S. population (and perhaps even some in the government) seem to view Al Qaeda as an isolated aberration; in fact, those who have suggested that American policies toward the Palestinians, Somalia, and other Muslim populations might have had some effect on the rise of Al Qaeda have been reviled and forced to apologize. Is it so heinous to suggest that our actions have consequences?
(Out of curiosity, see what you make of this statement from Joe Roth of Revolution Studios, which coproduced and codistributed the movie. He said, "I'm not sure it's the same statement about war that Ridley set out to make. When I look at it today [after Sept. 11], I feels it's saying that war is a necessary evil. Horrible as it is, if you turn your back on these kind of people, the result is terror." The first time I read that sentence, I interpreted "turn your back" as "refuse compassion and aid" -- in other words, if you stand aside in the face of genocide and famine, you promote resentment and anger. Which I agree with. But re-reading it, especially the phrase "these kind of people," I suspect he meant that if you don't crush antagonists immediately and thoroughly, they'll multiply. Which may be true, but it strikes me as coming down more on the Bruckheimer side of things than on the Scott side.)
Both the History Channel show and the Premiere article also raise explicit connections to the U.S.’s noninvolvement in subsequent genocidal civil wars in Rwanda and the Balkans, saying that the “stinging loss of American lives in Somalia” spooked Washington from committing troops to any situation that might result in American casualties. I’m not so sure that's a complete reason – after all, a genocidal civil war has been raging in Sri Lanka, for example, for years, and we’ve never lifted a finger to intervene – but again, the suggestion of adding a text card at the end of the film making a connection between our inaction in Rwanda and the Balkans and the Black Hawk incident in Somalia was nixed.
Not only does the movie not give a broad, long-term context, it doesn’t even give a clear picture of what was going on in Somalia (they should have just run the Saturday Night Live skit in which Phil Hartman as Clinton explains the situation in Somalia in a McDonald's, demonstrating how the warlords intercept food shipments... or Big Macs). The contribution of the U.N. peacekeeping force is largely ignored – they’re depicted as dragging their feet when asked to help rescue the American soldiers, out of spite at not being informed ahead of time of the mission to capture Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s lieutenants – even though scores of mostly Pakistani soldiers had been killed in the months leading up to the film’s events. (A primary trigger behind the U.N.’s decision to support the capture of Aidid was the slaughter of 24 Pakistanis in one day when they tried to shut down Aidid’s personal radio station.) And it gives short shrift to the fatalities on the Somali side: at least 500 dead, vs. 18 dead Americans.
The movie also leaves us misty-eyed and tight-chested at the heroism of the individuals, but gives the sense that the mission was a failure, that the 18 men died in vain. In fact, their mission – capturing Aidid’s lieutenants – was accomplished, although lives were lost. Moreover, the previous intervention, sending in the Marines to ensure the distribution of emergency food supplies, was an unqualified success that probably saved tens of thousands of Somalis from starving to death. The History Channel show gives a more balanced assessment and depicts the men who were in the firefight as upset that they were abruptly withdrawn from Somalia after the Black Hawk fiasco, because they felt like they were not being allowed to complete their mission.
If you're interested in the story but not inclined to buy Bowden's book, you can also read his original newspaper articles. I plan to, after which I might have more intelligent things to say about the movie, but I wanted to get this review out.
(And yes, I did sneak into the movie after seeing In the Bedroom, but this was Regal Cinema. They deserve to be screwed, because of their idiotic policy about not allowing backpacks or bags into their theater and because of their incompetence -- they screwed up the aspect ratio of In the Bedroom for the first 20 minutes, then, instead of stopping the movie and fixing it, fiddled with it for another five minutes or so, sliding different frames across the projector as they tried to figure out how to show a movie that had been showing in this theater 5 times a day for the past two weeks or so.)
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