A superb battle depiction that is too stupid or afraid to explore any context

Rating: Null/10 (3 February 2002)

Black Hawk Down
Sergeant 1st Class Norm "Hoot" Hooten (Eric Bana) won't say anything to people who ask him why he's a soldier, why he continues to hurl himself into the chaos of battle after battle. `They won't understand,' he tells Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann (Josh Hartnett). It's an interesting exchange that occurs toward the end of `Black Hawk Down,' one that best describes the progenitors of this empty exercise in violent imagery. Director Ridley Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer's attempt to bring in the Oscar bling-bling that Scott missed out on with `Gladiator' (rightfully so), and of which Bruckheimer has never been within spitting distance is, while technically superb, a thoughtless and numbing account of the disastrous 1993 US incursion into Somalia that ignores all the difficult and pressing questions the incident exposed. It's easy to be sucked in by the film's simplified account of the situation that led to the US raid of a Mogadishu marketplace. Title cards during the opening credits inform us that warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid was intercepting food shipments to the starving population, and that the US was attempting to round up Aidid and other prominent members of his militia. With this stripped-down scenario in place, `Black Hawk Down' feels free to spend the next two hours inside the firefight that that ensued when the American Delta and Ranger commandos found themselves surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned by a hostile crowd. This lengthy second act is, to be fair, a stunning depiction of a supremely disorienting operation. Taking his cues from Steven Spielberg's re-enactment of D-day in `Saving Private Ryan,' Scott inserts his cameras directly into the battle, bombarding us with hostile action from all directions. He intercuts this with satellite and helicopter views of the battlefield, allowing us to maintain a sense of the broader conflict as we're consumed within it. It's an extraordinarily effective and controlled depiction of an operation that goes wrong almost as soon as it begins. When the Black Hawk helicopters that are supposed to be providing cover fire and monitoring the situation from above start getting hit by Somali rockets, the focus turns from grabbing Aidid and his men to covering the crash sites and evacuating casualties. Yet for all its brutal depictions of this mess, this battle is all that `Black Hawk Down' amounts to. All it needs us to know is that the black guys in ragged clothes are `hostiles.' But why would thousands of Somalis be willing to take up arms against American soldiers? Why would they fight on behalf of a warlord who is starving them? And given the absolute indifference by the US and the rest of the international community to so many other humanitarian crises, why did the US care about Aidid in particular? Did these American soldiers really think they were going into battle to relieve the suffering of the Somalis, as Eversmann opines near the beginning? How could the brass have so badly misjudged the likely resistance they would encounter? I have my ideas, but `Black Hawk Down' either doesn't, or doesn't care to share them. Scott is too preoccupied with reminding us how heroic these Americans are. They were certainly brave, and the fact that they escaped with as few deaths as they did (19) is remarkable. But are they really heroic? There is hardly a mention of Somali casualties - I was quite surprised that the film even deemed it fit to mention in its closing credits (1000 Somalis died in the battle). And there is nary a mention of the misery and destruction left behind by it all, undoubtedly exacerbated by the fact that Aidid lived to rule Mogadishu for another two years before he was killed. `Black Hawk Down' doesn't care about any of these more interesting tangents. It's like taking a trans-Atlantic flight on Virgin Airlines; you're wowed for an hour or so by all the bells and whistles before you realize that you're bored, and that your ass is more numb than a third-string quarterback's in January. It has nothing to say about this incident, other than that it happened, and that it was very bad. Is this really enough reason to have made it in the first place?