great battle scenes; wafer-thin characters

Rating: Null/10 (20 July 2002)

In October 1993, Americans watching their TV sets at home were shocked to see the bodies of a handful of American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. What had begun as an effort to bring humanitarian relief to that war-torn country almost a year earlier had somehow turned into a political quagmire out of which it was becoming more and more difficult for the U.S. forces to extricate themselves. `Black Hawk Down' is Ridley Scott's nightmarish vision of that fateful day when the mission turned suddenly and hopelessly wrong.
Based on the novel by Mark Bowden, `Black Hawk Down' is a technically astonishing look into the savagery and horror of modern day warfare. Rarely have the resources of filmmaking been used so effectively in conveying the intensity and brutality of life in a combat zone. It's small wonder that the film received Academy Awards for its extraordinary editing and sound. Using every technical trick at his disposal, Scott has managed to plunge us right into the heart of the action, making us feel every explosion and hear every bullet as it goes whizzing past. Like the characters, we often find ourselves disoriented by the confusion of the scene, yet Scott also manages to keep the action geographically coherent most of the time. This he does by providing aerial views of the scene that let us know where the men are in relation to their surroundings.
What Scott is not able to do quite so well is to keep the characters themselves sufficiently differentiated to make them matter as much to the viewer as they probably should. We tend to lose the men in the mass of confusion, with each character looking pretty much like the next and being afforded very little opportunity to step to the forefront of this massive canvas and distinguish himself. In all fairness to the filmmakers here, one should note that this seems to be a trait peculiarly endemic to war films in general (the fact that combatants are all dressed alike doesn't help this situation much either). In the last decade or so, special effects artists have come so far in being able to recreate the graphic realism of the battlefield setting that writers no longer feel the need to provide much in the way of characterization to go along with the action scenes. More and more the fight sequences are being asked to carry these pictures alone. This was the case with the recent `We Were Soldiers' and it is the case here as well. Perhaps because of the nature of the true-life events being depicted here, Scott felt no need to ease up on the accelerator much in getting his story told. However, we do feel as if it would be nice to be able to distinguish his characters from one another and to get to know them a bit on a personal level. In a way, one appreciates the fact that the filmmakers have chosen to feature less well known actors in most of the roles. That heightens the realism factor since we don't feel as if we are watching movie stars playing the part of common soldiers. In that respect, the anonymity works well. Yet, I wonder if using familiar faces might not have helped a bit in allowing us to focus better on the characters as individuals, permitting us to catch our bearings a little more frequently so that we might be better able to distinguish who is who at all times.

This is not to say that `Black Hawk Down' does not provide a number of emotionally stirring moments throughout, particularly as we see the young men dying heroic deaths. Even given the minimal dialogue and character development, we do come to understand the sense of camaraderie that drives these brave men to do what they do.
As a result of this imbalance between the dazzling special effects and the wafer-thin characters, `Black Hawk Down' is a great technical triumph but a less-than-great (though still damn good) film overall.