An intense experience

Rating: 5/10 (26 February 2002)

Black Hawk Down is an intense, raw, documentary-like war movie; it's as if the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan just kept going....and going. Most of the film is a series of brutal, heart-pounding firefights between heavily outnumbered American special forces and wave after wave of Somali, machine-gun-toting brigands. The film is exhausting to sit through, as the relentless attacks fall one upon another, the Americans pinned in shattered buildings, or in the cockpits of crashed helicopters, or inside their own Armored Personnel Carriers. The movie doesn't just depict war as hell, it is hell itself... endless carnage served up without meaning or reason.

The film isn't a masterpiece. It doesn't offer much in the way of story, or a cogent point of view. Actually, it could have been a masterpiece if it had deliberately and consistently avoided all efforts at classical storytelling and adopted a strictly clinical approach. It is the occasional attempt at turning the film into a classical Hollywood movie (i.e. Castaway or Saving Private Ryan) that keeps it from achieving the kind of single-minded artistic purity of the best war movies, like Das Boot and The Thin Red Line. Its efforts at organizing the carnage are too cursory to turn the movie into a well-crafted drama, but they do spoil its chance at being a different kind of war movie, one that presents war as pure experience, without narrative.
The movie is not helped by the careful touch director Ridley Scott takes with the image of the U.S. military. Certainly the U.S. was on a heroic mission in Somalia, trying to ameliorate the terrible famine that Somalians were suffering at the time, yet the film seems too self-conscious about avoiding any negative images of the U.S. military whatsoever, whether it is incompetent officers (the usual standby, of course) or grunts committing questionable deeds. Amazingly, though the U.S. soldiers are being assaulted seemingly at random in a dense urban environment, not one accidentally guns down a civilian, or even shoots at an assailant who is in a non-aggressive posture (i.e., running away). These guys would have to have supernatural powers to differentiate immediate threats from false alarms in such an environment, and it simply isn't believable, in a movie that places all its bets on being "realistic".
I had the good fortune to see the movie in Hollywood with the director and producer (Jerry Bruckheimer) in attendance. In their remarks after the screening it was clear that the movie was made with substantial cooperation from the U.S. military. While the pyrotechnics in the film might have suffered without this cooperation, it's fair to wonder what sort of substantial compromises were made to the story to accommodate the military's cooperation, and neither director nor producer seemed to recognize the inherent problems with such a relationship, and it shows in the film.
Nonetheless Black Hawk Down is an exceptional film, one of the best war movies to come out of Hollywood in the past 20 years, and one that at times illustrates a fresh if brutal approach to the genre, and as importantly takes us deep inside a nightmare that has receded into memory as a minor if unpleasant international incident. This film shows that, if you're on the ground, there's no such thing as a "minor incident". You're either behind a desk, or you're out there living in hell, and what you see on CNN ain't the half of it.