Stupid and Tedious

Rating: 3/10 (6 July 2003)

So this film is better than Scott's _Gladiator_, which isn't saying much, _Gladiator_ being up there with _Rocky_ and _The Greatest Show on Earth_ as films least deserving of Best Picture, and it has a good cast including Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Orlando Bloom, Sam Shepard, and Tom Sizemore, but if I had been one of those marines, I'd feel insulted by this movie, despite the tribute to the fallen officers at the end, which seem more to give the picture clout.
This is one of the worst war movies ever made. It's 2 hours of video game action and 5 minutes of character development, and 10 minutes of credits. All the best war movies let you get to know the characters, and this does it less than the most stereotypical films, do, and only then in the worst way possible, in the form of what Stanley Kubrick called the "mandatory" scenes he and his source novel avoided in _Full Metal Jacket_. That created a film with much richer characters and much more believable fights in just under 2 hours. _Black Hawk Down_ has none of what made _Full Metal Jacket_, or _Platoon_, or _Catch-22_, or _MASH_, or _Three Kings_, or _No Man's Land_, or even Armando Crispino's _Commandos_ so good. In _Full Metal Jacket_, the Viet Cong were an unseen enemy. Here, the Somalis are the evil hordes of _Dawn of the Dead_, a mass of savages, or "skinnies" as they're called, who are there to be slaughtered in a war that was supposed to help the people. The few Somali we see as more than cannon fodder are melodramatic villains ill-befitting a realistic film about war.
None of the necessary irony that a failed mission needs to have comes through, nor any of the tragedy. Since we don't get to know these people at all, Scott goes the Paul Verhoeven route by having them die the most gruesome ways possible--getting halved, a severed finger, an exploding body that looks straight out of _Dawn of the Dead_ (why is Scott getting good work when Romero is getting DTV?).
When someone is severely abused by the system, such as Alex Murphy in Verhoeven's _RoboCop_, a gruesome death can work effectively as a means for gaining sympathy, but routine horrific war violence has minimal impact without giving good definition to the characters who are being harmed. _Saving Private Ryan_ gave us graphic war violence, even if some of it was a little over the top (the guy picking up his own arm in a lame reference to Kurosawa's _Ran_, which probably should have been snipped), but it gave us characters to focus on who were viewing on this, and we learned more about them as the film progressed, and even while it relied on the tired one-of-each style, they were fleshed-out characters. These are ciphers.
On the technical point, the CGI is far less noticeable than it is in _Gladiator_. The artificiality of all the scenes made that film feel like a video game because of the look, even though the bad writing was pure Hollywood. This film is a live-action video game with "cinema scenes" to advance the story. All of this exemplifies why Jerry Bruckheimer productions suck and why he ought to be involved in video game development. His style is inherently distancing since it fits in so well with interactive media, and watching video games without playing them is rarely exciting for me anymore, and this film was unrelenting tedium. Maybe I grew up and Bruckheimer didn't. Scott should have known better, but he was never that great a director, and it's all been downhill for him since _Blade Runner_, despite the honors he has undeservedly received. Maybe Bruckheimer picked him because he shares his first name with a space pirate in the _Metroid_ video games, since video games are all he seems to understand.
Almost everyone I know had a similar reaction to this film, but it kept coming up in my Amazon ratings, and got largely good reviews, so I gave the film a look. Critics have to watch hundreds of films a year, and so perhaps they'd be best equipped to compare due to having that broader knowledge base. Why this picture struck so many so strongly when so many war films in recent memory are so much better I don't understand. Perhaps the convergence of cinema and video games has become so strong that what I regard as tastelessness and simple-mindedness is now regarded as classy. The extra star is for the cast that had to be in this dreck with barely functional lines and for the use of color, particularly greens, Scott imbues on it.