Thumbs Down for Black Hawk Down

Rating: Null/10 (10 January 2002)

This is the kind of movie that's probably going to show up big on Oscar night -- heck, it might even win Best Picture. It's meticulously well made, looks beautiful (if you want to call exploding bodies "beautiful") and couldn't come at a better time when Americans probably want to feel good about themselves, their country, their place in the world. But for what it's worth, I really, really didn't find much value or enjoyment in this movie.

Do people really enjoy watching people get killed in various ways: falling off helicopters, getting fingers and legs blown off, guts spilling into the sand? Do you get pleasure from watching hundreds of Somalis get picked apart and mowed down by rifles and machine guns? Unless you consider this to be some kind of entertainment, there's nothing to recommend this movie for, especially in terms of its ideas. It offers only the most simplistic explanation for what led to the most disastrous American military operation since the Vietnam War. It doesn't offer much insight into the mistakes that were made before and during the operation, and how the government and the military might have reconsidered its policies and strategies to avoid this nightmare from happening again. Instead, it gives us the nightmare operation from start to finish, wall to wall action with little room to think about much of anything but where the next bullet is going to come from, and how the next body is going to get blown up. The underlying logic is that there comes a time when thinking just doesn't matter: it's all about "the guy next to you" and what you're willing to sacrifice for that. Ridley Scott calls this an "anti-war movie" but he's clearly having his cake and eating it too; it's obvious that he's in love with his own re-creation of bloody, intense combat, and that he can turn it into mass entertainment.
My comments are not meant to disrespect the brave soldiers who were placed in an impossible situation and fought tremendously to get themselves out. I disrespect the people who told (and sold) their story. In trying to give a feel-good patriotic spin to it, they do us all a disservice by avoiding the bigger picture. Heroism is great, but so is wisdom -- the wisdom to know how we can avoid disasters like what happened in Mogadishu, Somalia on October 3, 1993. This film barely gives us that wisdom, and is far more interested in giving us a blood-and-guts thrill ride.
Four years ago Steven Spielberg claimed that SAVING PRIVATE RYAN was the "war movie to end all war movies" -- that its graphic scenes of combat would persuade all of us that war was a terrible thing, never to be entered. Now Ridley Scott has made a movie that is even MORE graphic, and will no doubt send a wave of kids to the recruiting station with visions of its patriotic slaughter. Somehow, the madness has to stop.