Is MTV video-style camerawork and editing reality?

Rating: Null/10 (27 January 2002)

O.K. That shaky cam and that quick-cut editing works fine if you like heavy metal videos. And it worked for D-Day in "Saving Private Ryan."
But to use it as the sole style for two solid hours of film, for the sake of "reality", is ridiculous. Folks, shaky cams and quick cuts are NOT reality. It may convey a sense of chaos and immediacy, but it has nothing to do with being "real."
It's a popular film/video style right now; Ridley Scott didn't invent it, and I'm so tired of gullible moviegoers who are claiming to have been "In The Movie" thanks to this style. Bottom line: the movie's a technical wonder of a shaky cam film, lots of dough was spent on special effects and you don't get to know one character well enough to empathize with them. That's fairly ironic, when the central statement of the film has to do with the fact that when it all comes down to it, it's no politics, it's just you and the guy next to you. Yeah? Well, it would have been nice to KNOW the guy next to you, then. The real soldiers in the actual conflict did. We never do. And as far as this hype about the movie not pushing a political agenda, you'd have to be deaf and dumb not to catch the American as Mighty World Warrior bull. The Americans fire. Somalians fall by the dozens. They fire? We dash around and occasionally get hit. The Americans react to the death around them. Except for an old man and a little boy, the Somalis are not depicted as humans, only marauding gun fodder. No time to react, only time to get mowed down. These may be 18 year-old soldiers, but they have the impossible resiliance of Ahhh-nold S. I'll tell you, according to this flick, most of the 1000 Somalis that died in this conflict were picked off by 123 Americans on the ground with rat-at-tat guns. I suspect our "Death From Above" was far more responsible for razing the Somalis. To me, this movie stinks of Hollywood, not realism. Vicariously-experienced stylized mayhem, not the reality of war.