Deafened by the din

Rating: Null/10 (10 July 2002)

Once again, Ridley Scott proves to me that he is an idiot savant, a total genius with a camera, nearly incapable of creating anything approaching human drama... except ocasionally, and only by accident.
While BHD is tense, non-stop action, it wanders aimlessly in search of characters and narrative drive. From Josh Hartnett's idealistic young soldier taking over his first command to Tom Sizemore's reprisal of every William Bendix and Stuart Whitmore "WWII tough but funny and humane Sgt" role, its got all of the surface cliches without any of the depth. So many others are just nameless, faceless soldiers with crewcuts, barely distinguishable except in death.
Storywise, you've got the kidnapping of the tough arms dealer. Which apparently has nothing to do with anything. Then you've got the "copters silently flying over the water" scene, right out of APOCALYPSE NOW, leading the characters on some vague assault mission on some place to get some people. Once it turns into the inevitable, all hell breaks loose. "War is Hell"...
Even where your point is to show the chaos and hellish nature of real combat, you've still have to draw narrative lines to lead your audience through the story. Even the individual battle scenes should have clear objectives and a sense of what is being accomplished by each strategic manuever, and clarity about its success or failure... not for the characters, necessarily, but for the audience. Here, not only is the battle chaotic, but so is the storytelling. There are no clear objectives, no sense of who is where, or why, or where they're going to go from there. Its just endless conflicts, body parts flying, HumVees driving endlessly around getting shot at, and then night falls... a short respite to watch a fallen comrade die as they try to pull his artery out of his leg. Then, more shooting. Soldiers come back to save their brothers in arms. lots of bullets. stuff blows up. But, there is no DRAMA here, no storyline pulling you through. No characters of sufficient depth or originality to give it even a hint of honesty. Just a lot of stuff blowing up.

When Sam Peckinpah made Westerns, a lot of guys got shot in very interesting and bloody ways. But, you'd spent 2 hours with them first, finding out who and what they were, for good or ill, and you CARED when they got shot. Even on a pure action level, it doesn't measure up to the first 20 minutes of PRIVATE RYAN. It doesn't measure up to the "valkyrie" scene in APOCALYPSE NOW, or the nightmarish, LSD vision of that film. As viceral kinetic action, its no ROAD WARRIOR.
BHD is basically a Bruckheimer film, where handsome young men perform heroic deeds at great speed and high volume.I didnt hate it, but it left me totally uninvolved, unmoved, and not particularly entertained. I was however, like the goofy-looking soldier in the film, left deafened by the din.