Two-thirds glamourised carnage, one-third whitewash

Rating: 2/10 (25 July 2002)

"It tells the story from the soldier's point of view"; "It shows us what it was like to be there" ... at least, that's what we hear from people who want to excuse Ridley Scott's myopia and shallowness. Not so.
We aren't told the story "from the soldier's point of view", because we aren't told the story, period. Nor do we really get the soldier's point of view. Scott shows us ample footage from the point of view of the odd Somalian sniper, and from the point of view of command central, and (albeit rarely) from the point of view of a civilian, and from no particular point of view at all; he focuses just as much on what the soldiers aren't looking at as he does on what they are looking at. There's an unmistakable attempt to pull off a god's-eye perspective. It doesn't succeed. Actually, it's more as though Scott found himself in the middle of a REALLY COOL war, and he photographed all the REALLY COOL stuff around him as though he were shooting a beer commercial, making a mental note to edit it all later. Then he edited it as though it were a beer commercial. And who's surprised? That's how he makes all his movies.
That's why the movie fails on the second count, too - showing us what it was like to be there. There's no "what it was like" anywhere in this film. Actual soldiers who fight side by side can, at least when staring one another in the eyes at a distance of half a metre, recognise one another, which is more than we can do without straining our eyes and struggling to remember if this is the guy who makes coffee or the one who made that phone call earlier, you know, the one next to the pin-up - assuming the coffee guy and the pinup guy were distinct, which isn't certain. Besides, ANY real life event has a continuity missing here. Maybe the soldiers were as confused as I was about what was going on, but they couldn't have been as confused as I was about what (at any one point) they were trying to do. The early parts of the mission, in which everyone knew what was going on and what they were doing, are shot in precisely the same bewildering, arty, choppy fashion as the later bits, in which the bewildering, choppy artiness is allegedly meant to convey the soldiers' own confusion. I don't buy it.
Moreover, there's clearly an attempt to provide some political context at the beginning - or more accurately, a pretence. Now, I don't demand political context. A good film could be made - possibly in the vein of Kafka's "The Trial" - in which we don't know what the war is about or how it started or what the soldiers were doing there. But if you're going to TRY to tell us the story, or ACT as though you're telling us the story, then it's as well to get it RIGHT. The half-a-dozen sentences of context at the beginning are completely unhelpful. And misleading, if not actually false. The Americans weren't there to provide famine relief. They weren't, as the film obliquely suggests, obstructed in any way by UN troops - in fact, the chutzpah of the Pentagon, who had control over the script, claiming such a thing, blows me away. Twenty-two countries obediently pooled their forces under United Nations command, but the United States, as always, refused to do any such thing - partly to leave the US army free to indulge in whatever war crimes it pleased.
One or two moments are unintentionally revealing. A fresh soldier arrives and innocently refers to "Mogadishu", but an older hand immediately corrects him: "Firstly, it's 'The Mog'. Nobody calls it 'Mogadishu'." No, nobody, except perhaps the people who live there. If troops from a foreign power were to walk around my country as though they owned it, terrorising the locals (accidentally, according to the film, although there's ample evidence that much of it was deliberate), I would still find it an added insult if they were to contemptuously refer to our capital city as "The Can" and to other cities as "The Syd" and "The Melb" - unless they were inspired to do so by local practises, which, something tells me, wasn't the case here.
Then there's the note at the end. It says: "...over 1000 Somalis were killed and 19 Americans lost their lives." (That's a ratio of 53 to one.) The Somalis were "killed", the Americans "lost their lives"; Scott doesn't even have the grace to say something even-handed like, "1000 Somalis and 19 Americans were killed." In case the double standard weren't obvious enough, we see a LIST of the 19 dead Americans (but not, of course, the Somalis). For a second I suspected that Scott was being subtle for the first time in his life, and that this sick joke was deliberate. Then I remembered the rest of the film and thought: no, probably not.