Black Hawk Watered Down

Rating: Null/10 (19 January 2002)

Back in the summer, I saw the "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" teaser and IMMEDIATELY raced home to try to find it online. I didn't find it, but I did find Mark Bowden's Philadephia Inquirer articles on it, and I was hooked. I ordered the book.
I don't know if I suffered from reading the book three times in the last six months had anything to do with it, or whether all the great reviews I've read had built up my expectations...I honestly TRIED to go into the theater with an open mind. I'm trying to see how great this movie was...I'm trying to look at it as if I'd never read the book. I'm actually thinking of seeing it again to see if I like it better.
The truth is, I kept waiting to feel MASSIVE anxiety watching this movie, and I never did. Maybe I have too vivid an imagination. Maybe I've played way too much Counter-Strike. Maybe my home theater and my DTS copy of Saving Private Ryan is just too good, and I've become de-sensitized to movie depictions of war.
God, I really wanted this movie to be special. I didn't think it was.

--Not to take anything away from our men and women in uniform...those people have my utmost respect and appreciation for defending us.
--and not to take anything away from Ridley Scott. I STILL think Alien is the scariest movie ever made, and I was one of the seven people that LOVED Legend. This is the guy who gave birth to Blade Runner.
But man, I have to admit I was let down by Black Hawk Down on a number of levels.
The setup was nice. Great music, great shots...and when the guys take off initially to Stevie Ray Vaughn's rendition of "Voodoo Chile (slight return)", I was GEKED.
But these guys that say it's like a two hour version of the first twenty minutes of SPR are exaggerating, imho. In SPR, I FELT the Americans being HAMMERED on that beach. I've read a couple of things some of the rangers who've seen the movie (and gave positive reviews to)have written about it, and they claim that the movie only has about 1/10th of the bullets flying that the actual battle had. The book made it seem like it was just withering walls of lead and rpgs--just a horizontal HAILSTORM of bullets so thick you could actually SEE them. It depicted it as ABSOLUTELY merciless and relentless.
I also had a problem with the way the Somalis were "stylized". Not that I know any better because I wasn't there, but these guys all dressed in black, with aviator shades and bandoliers--seemed to me like a half-assed way of putting a face on the enemy. All the pictures I've seen of these guys show them as just skinny dudes in second-hand clothes with guns. No bandoliers, no swagger, just bony khat junkies with weapons that looked way too big for them. Hey, maybe I'm wrong.
Speaking of aviator shades, wtf was up with Sam Shepard and his? On again, off again. Was this the Bruckheimer influence? That seemed a little more Hollywood than Fort Benning. I have a world of respect and admiration for Shepard as both an actor and playwright, but General Garrison didn't sound like the kind of guy who wore shades INDOORS.
I have to admit, this was the first time I've heard a Vulcan cannon spool up in a film--truly a powerful sound. --but every time they showed the effects of it, it was just squibs under some extras' shirts. I was under the impression that this thing literally SHREDS people. My point is, it seemed unrealistic and anti-climactic.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not disappointed because I didn't get to see people get shredded. It's just that if you're going to portray war accurately, I think you should portray war accurately.
And I have to mention the rpgs. In the film, a Somali militiaman fires the rpg that takes out Cliff Wolcott's helo ON THE RUN WITH A GUY BEHIND HIM. From what I've read, the Somalis had to rig special deflectors on the back of their launch tubes to fire upwards because the backblast could seriously injure, if not kill you. They also had to build pits to divert the backblast, so they fired upward from stationary, pre-determined positions. Does having the Somali fire the rpg on the run justify poetic license just enough to ignore reality?
When the troops received the go-codeword for the mission, "Irene," in reality, they were already aboard the helos. They got on them nearly every day, and were usually ordered to stand down. What a great opportunity to show the heat and boredom of the same old daily grind, only to have the rangers shocked out of their false sense of security by an authentic go-code. What a perfect way to start their disorientation--with the mission. Instead, we got a hundred guys running out to the helicopters, guns in the ready position. Sounds like Bruckheimer. If Michael Bay had been directing, they would have swaggered toward the camera in slow motion, shoulder to shoulder, in a glorious telephoto shot, waves of heat rising from the asphalt ala Armageddon or Bad Boys.
Then there was Private Blackburn's fall from the helicopter. Why switch from Sgt. Eversmann's point of view to the objective when it would be much more shocking and disorienting stay with his point of view, have him rope in and just FIND Blackburn lying there in the cloud of dust, as he did in the book? Why take poetic license to JUSTIFY Blackburn falling off the rope with the Blackhawk dodging (DODGING?) an rpg fired from forty feet away? Does it make it more dramatic? Does it make it more dramatic enough to change the facts?

No one can stylize things the way Ridley Scott does. But I've never seen a war movie that was LIT so well, or suffering soldiers look so cool. I actually was distracted from the story by it..."wow, cool green glow on Eric Bana." It looked good, but I never got the feeling that the form, the IMAGES were used to express the relentless anxiety these soldiers must have felt, alone, surrounded, teetering on the edge of despair and desperation. It seems to me that it was usually expressed through dialogue and/or by scene.
I guess all in all, I expected the thing just to HAMMER me from the git-go, to ratchet up in intensity, and to stay there for a while. I only got bits and spurts of fear here and there, interspersed with exposition. It was start/stop all the way. ENOUGH WITH THE EXPOSITION! I think they took too many moments to explain EVERYTHING that was going on to the audience (I'm guessing this is another fine example of Bruckheimer's continuing contempt for the intellect of the masses), and didn't just make something seamlessly horrific and unrelenting, the way it was for the soldiers. The film did not need the Atta kidnapping sequence; it was a redundant attempt to justify to the audience the American presence in Somalia--as if we needed one after the opening scene of starving and dead Somalis. We could have spent less time in the command center--less exposition, shorter, tighter bits of dialogue with General Garrison outwardly stoic and inwardly on edge. Why have any exposition at all other than saying at the top of the film, "This Story is True," and then depicting the facts in all of their undeniable horror?
The story could easily have been told, and told more honestly imho, without losing any truth in the portrayal of the events of 10/3/93, if it had focused constantly on the men under SAVAGELY intense fire.

Where were the women and children used as human shields? Why didn't they spend more time on the truck driver with the unexploded rpg lodged in his torso--he was STILL ALIVE when that happened--what a great opportunity to express the DIRE PERIL and unique absurdity of their situation. Instead, it was treated as a just another brief novelty of war. Where was the wounded soldier who was blown out of his Humvee by an rpg and then RUN OVER by the following truck? Where was the ox that was shredded by gunfire? Where was the guy riding the cow with the AK? Where was the soldier hiding behind the tiny piece of pipe protruding from the road while his buddies burst out laughing? Where were the two Somalis with the machine gun in the middle of the road who WOULD NOT DIE? Where were the flashbang grenades? Where was the indestructible old Somali man with the big white afro? Nearly all of the Humvees and trucks had flat tires and were nearly in pieces when they returned to the airbase, not just a few bullet holes. Dominic Pila, god rest his soul, the sergeant who did the impression of Captain Steele and got a bullet in the neck while operating the .50 cal in the lead Humvee, in reality, was shot in the face, and the entire back of his head was blown off. All of these events serve to demonstrate the horror AND the absurdity of war on their own merit, AND THEY ACTUALLY HAPPENED. The point isn't that all of these events should have been in the film; the point is that there were a lot of neglected and missed opportunities to take the audience deeper into the living hell in which these men were stranded.
And what was with the huge, poetic, sum-it-all up but momentarily throw realism to the wind, cast of a thousand Somalis standing atop a burning hill doing nothing while the American soldiers run away shot? This is a story that doesn't NEED editorializing, that doesn't NEED poetry.

I truly, honestly wish I could have seen it the way most of the people who are raving about it did. I really wanted to see it that way. I was looking forward to seeing it that way. I'm not disappointed because I have some twisted bloodlust--I just believe that if you're going to express the horror of war--as Bowden did in his book--that you don't hold back. These guys fought and died for all of us. I just think they are due having their story told as graphically and as gut-wrenchingly and as honestly as possible. Despite the fact that 19 US soldiers died and over 70 were wounded in action, the mission was completed successfully; it was in fact, a victory. Mentioning that might have been a better cap to this film than the thin irony that Aidid died the day before Garrison retired.
The soldiers had it bad in the movie. They had it A LOT WORSE in the book.

I've just read this review, and I think I may sound a bit like those guys who quibbled over details about the adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. I hope I'm wrong. None of the above changes were made to condense time. And Black Hawk Down was about REAL people, who suffered unimaginably REAL events.
Just my two cents.