Frustrating-- a well-made movie about nothing in particular

Rating: Null/10 (13 November 2002)

Black Hawk Down is so technically well-made and vivid in its depiction of the incredibly technologized way America fights wars, that it's frustrating how little it comes to in the end. Mark Bowden's book hasn't been Hollywoodized in the
conventional sense-- there aren't love stories a la Pearl Harbor or moments of wacky military comedy, as you might expect. But it has been Hollywoodized in another way, which is, stripped of all geopolitical context on the assumption that an American audience would not be interested in anything other than the fates of some handsome young actors playing Americans (though many aren't,
actually).
We're given little sense of the African side of things-- what the appeal of
warlords like Aidid was, how the country has broken down and why you'd ally
yourself with one strong man or another. This led some critics to see the way hundreds of anonymous Africans are mowed down without a thought in the
movie as essentially racist. Yet it wouldn't have to be; they could be essentially an alien menace to the main characters and yet be granted a logic and even a
dignity of their own, as the Zulu hordes in Zulu are. But to do that you'd have to understand them a little, and this movie seems profoundly incurious about Africa itself. There also might be sharp points to be made about the clash of a highly technologized army with an almost pre-technology one (except for its stock of Western weaponry), but again, the lack of interest in the African side makes it impossible to draw such a picture. The movie doesn't have to turn into
Apocalypse Now, this was an entirely different war for different reasons, but it doesn't even seem aware that there's anything interesting about the contrast.
In the end, what makes Black Hawk Down a frustratingly insubstantial
experience is that the real-life civil war in Somalia just becomes a prop for a story of movie guys in peril-- like an Alien movie, or that thing where Emilio Estevez and his yuppie buddies get lost in inner city Detroit.