"One hundred caskets to fill"

Rating: 7/10 (28 March 2012)

After the success of Saving Private Ryan in 1998, the war movie was rebranded from the moral fable of the Vietnam era to something that was essentially an exciting experience for its audience. Black Hawk Down was perhaps the most extreme example of that approach, a pure video-game movie that pares down all the camaraderie and humanising to just a handful of brief exchanges, and puts almost all its attention upon the actual business of killing each other.
However Black Hawk Down differs from a lot of modern action pictures in its pacing, as orchestrated by director Ridley Scott. Eschewing the usual frenetic overkill, Scott takes a relatively relaxed approach. In the first Lord of the Rings movie, which was released the same week, the average shot length must be something like two seconds. In Black Hawk Down the average shot length is more like three to four seconds, and it makes all the difference. There is time to savour expressions and notice tiny details, making up for the lack of rounded characterisation earlier in the movie. Scott allows the interplay between the men to come out, not in the script, but in glances, grimaces and carefully-placed props. The earliest scenes are eerily calm, providing a moody build-up for the action that is to come.
And it's all done with such grace and smoothness. The timing of shots is rhythmic and the images are beautiful. Scott and his cinematographer Slawomir Idziak create some extremely stylised colour schemes which evoke temperature as much as mood. When we move from Garrison's meeting with Atto (browns and yellows) to the hanger with his troops (blues) you can practically feel a whoomph of cool air hitting you. Add to this mix a musical soundtrack that dances from the power of contemporary and classic rock tracks to the haunting sounds of Denez Pringent and Lisa Gerrard. Black Hawk Down has an aesthetic quality rare in war movies.
Although this isn't really a movie about deep performances, it's worth making a few points about casting, which seems to follow types rather than talents. For example, Tom Sizemore was then your go-to man for mean-faced sergeant characters. It seems unusual to cast Scotsmen Ewan MacGregor and Ewen Bremner as US soldiers, especially as MacGregor in particular can't really do the accent. However I think the fact that they are outsiders among the rest of the cast feeds into the impression they give of combat virgins.
The trouble with Black Hawk Down is that it actually needs to be as visually sumptuous as it is. There isn't really much to go on here, dramatically; apart from a little chitchat in the first half hour, the whole movie is essentially one very long battle scene. When there are talky scenes, all we get is bland, one-dimensional dialogue – the usual trite "A man's gotta do" stuff. The only way it actually really conveys anything meaningful is through putting us into that combat zone and giving us a little taste of the terror and the exhilaration. And perhaps, for this, it is a stronger war movie.