Black Hawk Down
by Sasha Stone

For those of us Ridley Scott fans who were disappointed with Gladiator we get our beloved director back with Black Hawk Down, one of the best films of the year, and certainly of Scott's esteemed career. The Directors Guild agrees, having just nominated Scott for Best Director of the year.

Most surprising of all is that the film's producer is Jerry Bruckheimer, not known for his subtlety, but rather known for producing films depicting girls in short skirts cavorting with cocky young studs in the midst of testosterone-fueled blood and guts. No, it's as if Bruckheimer went down the Yellow Brick Road, paid the Wizard of Oz a visit and got himself a brain, a heart, and the nerve. This film should scrape Bruckheimer clean. But it does a lot more than that.

Black Hawk Down should not be substituted for the Mark Bowden book on which it is based - like two other notable releases this year, The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter, it should be taken as a companion piece to its book. Unlike those aforementioned films, however, Black Hawk Down works as well on its own - as a study in combat, a great war film, and as an expression of the country's mood after 9/11.

Of course, Black Hawk Down is based on true events and doesn't have the luxury fiction affords. If it did, we might have seen more of Hollywood's brand of heroism - go in, kick butt, and make us all feel safe. Safe is not what we feel watching this film, which, as we now know, is not what we should feel.

The movie tells the story of the ill-fated plan to drop in some troops to take out the powerful warlord Aideed in Somalia. But we were underestimating our enemy, and overestimating our own power. The special forces unit expects the "smash and grab" job to be over within an hour, instead, the mission becomes a 19-hour odyssey in which the sole purpose becomes simply, "Leave no man behind."

The trouble starts in the beginning, when the militia is tipped off to the unit's arrival (they burn tires to spread the word) and suddenly fighters are everywhere shooting high powered rockets at the choppers, ultimately downing two. Getting the men out of those downed birds is what the film will concern itself with for the next two and a half grueling hours.

In the end, the mission will leave a thousand Somalis and nineteen American soldiers dead, and will impact the future of America's military operations forever. It's important that this information is imparted to the audience. We think it's bad nineteen of ours died, but they lost a thousand.

Black Hawk Down never hits a false note, not even the handful of times where characters must speak the themes of the film. When one of the soldiers admits he's too afraid to go back out there, he is told that what he does at that moment is what makes the difference. In another film, like Pearl Harbor, the line would get a chuckle or two. Not here.

Moreover, Scott does a great job bringing to life infamous moments from that mission (the ones you might have heard on the Frontline special or read in the book) - the soldier being dragged through the street, the old Somali man carrying his dead child through the streets, oblivious to what is going on around him, the captured soldier with his beat up face, swollen eyes, and dazed expression, which seemed to epitomize that ill-fated military disaster.

Much credit must be given to Scott's team, chief among them his cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, who comes at the action fiercely and unflinchingly. Hans Zimmer's score is the best of the year, hands down, and it is helped with a fabulous soundtrack, including the agonizingly accurate "Suspicious Minds" by Elvis. The actors take it to heights unknown, especially Josh Hartnett, who reinvents himself by scraping off the Pearl Harbor mud. Sam Shepard is pitch-perfect as Major General William Garrison, who took full responsibility for the tragedy in Mogadishu. But this film belongs to its director, Ridley Scott, who seems, for the first time in many years, to have something he wants to say, and says it with the kind of passionate conviction films today often lack.

Black Hawk Down shares much with the Bosnian film No Man's Land. One is satirical and one is literal, but both feature soldiers whose lives are at stake because of commands coming from high places - from masters of war who aren't the ones taking bullets. Both films feature a fairly flaccid United Nations force that arrives in tanks to help fix the problem. These are not films to avoid in light of recent events, rather, it proves once again that in times of crisis we turn to the artist for greater understanding, or, if nothing else, for the opportunity to help us mourn and grieve the unbearable.

Contrary to some critics of the film, Black Hawk Down did not strike me as jingoistic or even patriotic in the traditional sense of the word. There is no Rambo, there is no Dirty Harry - there are only flesh and blood makeshift heroes doing their job. Sound familiar? Indeed, this is exactly how we all felt on September 11th. We were stunned that America couldn't fight back. That is, until we flattened Afghanistan. But as is pointed out so clearly in this film, we can't think that if we took out Aideed that the rest of the militia would simply put down their weapons. We are fighting something we simply do not understand. In the end, it seems likely, that for all of our grand hopes of "nation building," it will come down to what this film comes down to: protecting the person standing next to you.

One need look no further than Scott's technique of freezing the action in places to show how fast bullets fly, how fast thumbs can be severed or how quickly a body can be sliced in half by a rocket. Scott refuses to let us look away. We need to see, we need to know, we need to remember.

©2002 Sasha Stone
CineScene