Technically excellent but little more than that

Rating: 6/10 (28 January 2002)

"Black Hawk Down" looks and sounds superb as it tells of the incident by US forces to try and take out members of the Somalian warlord Aidid's cabinet. It's dark and gritty and, with the help of cinematography by Slavomir Idziak, the viewer is launched very effectively into the chaos of the battle. Ridley Scott chose to use tight, sharp sound production values which helps add to the intensity - there's a welcome sparseness of pointless noise and music in the movie.
And so the movie looks and sounds great... but that's not quite enough.
Complaints have been made about the lack of characterisation - and they're entirely justified. None of the personnel are given any depth - at most they become one line summaries such as "the joker one", "the idealist one" (Josh Harnett), "the excited rookie" (Orlando Bloom) and the "never-seen-combat-before-because-I-am-deskbound" (Ewan McGregor). Now Scott may be banking that this is enough because we should care for the characters seeing as how they were real people - but that's not a good enough excuse. The script should have decided to either ignore characterisation entirely or deal with it far more adeptly (as other war movies have) - instead it makes such weak attempts that the characters seem one-dimension and hardly a credit to the real men. Anyone who writes this off as saying how men don't stand out in combat may have a point - but for a cinema audience this is not an acceptable response because if we don't care for the people on-screen then the impact of the pretty-explosions matter less and it becomes a giant video-game on screen.
I enjoyed "Black Hawk Down" because of the pretty-eye-candy and directorial work of Ridley Scott (who may actually deserve an Oscar nomination for making the movie look as good as it does). However it is disturbingly akin to a computer game in that we never face the true pain of the characters involved. It's left to superior war movies such as "Apocalypse Now", "Platoon", "Full Metal Jacket" and "Saving Private Ryan" to deal with the emotional spectrum of war as well as the violent. In the end we have a nice very and very hollow movie - 6.5/10