Very realistic war drama

Rating: 10/10 (19 March 2002)

The history of film has given us some great war movies, e.g. Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory chronicled WW1, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Oliver Stone's Platoon, and Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket showed us the madness involved in the Vietnam War, and Steven Spielberg's recent Saving Private Ryan chronicled a chapter in WW2. Now, Ridley Scott, with Black Hawk Down, has given us one of the most realistic depictions of what it feels like to be in the heart of battle. It is about a group of US soldiers who in 1993 tried to capture two Somalian guerrilla warlords in a mission that went terribly wrong. Various critics have complained that there is not enough character development in Black Hawk Down. The complaint is basically that in a film that boasts a running time of roughly 2 1/2 hours, only the first half hour or so is devoted to giving us the background of the various characters, and why we should care about any of them. While I believe that this criticism is not completely off the mark, considered purely as a technical exercise designed to get the viewer to feel "what it's like" to be in a war, it is undeniable that Black Hawk Down is something of a masterpiece. Spielberg wowed audiences in 1998 with the technically brilliant and realistic battle sequences that frame Saving Private Ryan. But whereas Spielberg's film eventually "slowed down" to give us character development, etc., Scott's film, after the initial half hour of set up, never lets up. For the next two hours or so, Black Hawk Down assaults the viewer with a technically brilliant recreation of the brutality, craziness, and the horror of war. The event of war is presented without moralistic commentary; Scott wisely lets the action speak for itself. The brutality of war is presented as a simple fact. This is not a "recruiting" film; this is not necessarily an "anti-war" film; it is a film that realistically (and brilliantly) shows us what war is LIKE.