Mission Impossible

Rating: 9/10 (7 December 2002)

This is a very difficult film to evaluate. I'm not sure exactly how closely the narrative follows the historical facts, for one thing. Certainly some of the dialog is fictional, but it's less the dialog than the layout of the situation that needs to be understood, and the movie is weak on that point. One of the docuchannels, perhaps Discovery, showed a two-hour special on this incident, shortly after the movie was released. The documentary is a lot easier to understand than the movie itself. I emphasize historical accuracy because the rest of the film is fairly competent and doesn't need much in the way of comment. No real acting is called for. The photography is adequate, tinted beige with flying dust during daylight sequences, almost as much as silent films might have been, and a sort of sickly green at night. I had a very hard time keeping up with the location of the various units, or remnants of units, and with just exactly who was who, except for Sam Shepherd who is easily identifiable. The special effects were up to what one would expect of an expensive modern movie. There was an abundance of realistic gore, of bullets clanking off metal, and so forth. Maybe a bit too much. It was inevitable that "Saving Private Ryan" would initiate a new level of graphic violence.
The movie delineates four groups of people. (1) The heroic American elite units, Rangers and Delta Force. (2) The villainous, practically cannibalistic rabble of the Somali "militia." (3) The resentful and reluctantly cooperative Pakistanis. And (4) the Somali civilians who are suffering the most.
It's a brave film because its subject is an uninvited intervention in a remote anarchistic country done for humanitarian reasons, and it was a failure. We were supposed to relieve starvation and introduce order into a social universe of moral nihilism. I remember feeling that we were going to have trouble getting along in this place that nobody had ever heard of when clips were shown on TV news of Marines standing guard on trucks that were trundling along the unpaved streets. A handful of laughing skinny kids were running alongside the trucks and knocking cartons of food off into the dust. The angry Marines, used to more discipline, were swatting and shouting at the children. For the first few days, the "militia" lay low. ("Militia" is in quotes because they weren't militia, just warring factions led by charismatic leaders.) After they realized they weren't going to be annihilated, that the UN actually DIDN'T intend to kill everyone and take over, they emerged from hiding doing what they did best, running around with automatic weapons, often mounted on the beds of old pick-ups, and shooting at one another. Well, this was what we had come to stop, right? According to respectable reports in the New Yorker and elsewhere, it was decided on our part that the biggest nuisance of all was one particular warlord. He, out of many contenders, was identified as the "enemy" and it was seen as necessary to arrest him, if we could find him first. The search and the attempt at capture, which this movie depicts, seems largely to have been done out of rage and frustration. Well, we didn't get the guy we were after, since this wasn't fiction. And we lost eighteen American men (all enlisted men), and the Pakistanis lost two dozen as well, though the film doesn't mention it.
I was gripped by the movie from beginning to end. What I took away from it was a feeling that there are simply some missions that are impossible. After all, our most highly trained troops took high tech weapons of all sorts and deployed them against a horde of disorganized hostiles armed with nothing more than small arms and grenades launchers. And we sent our men into a country in which little laughing kids could PO the Marines, a country we understood nothing about, against an "enemy" that ourselves had defined, in a city in which we didn't know our way around. George F. Will put it very well: "We have no obligation to do that which is impossible."
The Gulf War of course was a much larger military enterprise. And when we think of the last war we fought, we think of our overwhelming victory there. I wish that every living person who hungers for war at this moment could see "Blackhawk Down" so that they could envisage a different scenario, a different set of scenes than our airplanes bombing missile bases amidst pretty fireworks, our tanks blowing the hatches off those of the bad guys. It's possible that instead of ending in a quick victory, our next military intervention may end up tragically, more of a bloody nose than an adrenalin rush.