Here's a review:
Review: Ridley Scott knows how to make movies. Big movies ("Gladiator") and
little movies ("Alien"). Good movies ("Blade Runner") and bad movies ("1492").
Important movies ("Thelma & Louise") and silly movies ("Hannibal").
With "Black Hawk Down," he’s made a big, good, important movie.
"Black Hawk Down" is a stunning depiction of war. So much so that you have to
keep reminding yourself that this is not a documentary. Yet an approximation of a
documentary is what Scott has achieved. Based on Mark Bowden’s blow-by-blow
account of a ferocious 15-hour battle that took place in 1993 between U.S. troops
and Somalian street fighters in an area of Mogadishu known as the Bakara
Market, the picture has a riveting versimilitude — a sense of time and place that
smells of explosives and helicopter fuel and blood.
Scott sets us down in the middle of Somalia where American and U.N. troops
have been sent to ensure (try?) that food supplies sent to alleviate a famine get to
those who need them and not to Gen. Mohammed Farrah Aidid and his gun-toting
warlords.
Gen. William F. Garrison (Sam Shepard) devises a plan to send his Delta Force
and Army Ranger troops into Mogadishu to capture Aidid’s top lieutenants. The
mission should take less than an hour. One veteran tells a rookie not to bother
taking his canteen; everything will be over so quickly he won’t need it.
Only everything isn’t. A downed helicopter is just the first of many incidents that
turn a routine mission into a grotesque dance of death, dismemberment and
dogged heroism. Garrison’s elite squads are determined to leave no one behind —
even if all they can recover is what’s left of a fallen comrade.
Scott tosses us directly into the chaos and cacophony of urban warfare where the
"front" switches from street to street. Grenades explode in front of video stores.
Gun-toting civilians are as lethal as Aidid’s militia. Death waits outside doorways,
underneath windows.
A lot of directors can pour buckets of blood onto the screen. Scott, however,
knows that the horror is in the details. Limbs are severed. A downed pilot, trapped
in his ’copter, is massacred. In a gruesome bit of frontline surgery, a soldier
plunges his fist into another soldier’s wound (you can’t help but hear echoes of the
"Not my leg!" screams from "Gone With the Wind").
Where the details blur is in the soldiers who are losing limbs and suffering
wounds. There are a few exceptions — Josh Hartnett’s idealist; Tom Sizemore’s
stolid vet; Ewan McGregor’s desk jockey turned fighter; Shepard’s gritty but
essentially helpless commanding officer. But for the most part, we can barely
distinguish one gore-splattered grunt from another. As for the Somalis, they are
reduced to a faceless enemy — like the warriors out of "Zulu" (a movie that "Black
Hawk Down" oddly resembles at times).
Scott isn’t interested in politics. He doesn’t want to argue about whether or not the
U.S. mission was ill-advised or if Garrison’s strategy was botched. His objective is
pure, simple and relentless. Here are American soldiers at war. Here’s what they
went through. Here’s how they lived and how they died.
Like Sam Fuller’s blunt B-movie battleground flicks or John Irvin’s grunts’-eye-view
of Vietnam in "Hamburger Hill," "Black Hawk Down" isn’t about war in the
abstract; it’s about the men who make war. And it’s conveyed in a numbingly
visual, visceral and immediate way (hats off to cinematographer Slawomire Idziak,
best-known for his collaborations with Krzysztof Kieslowski.
"They won’t understand why we do it," says one soldier, referring to those who’ve
never been near the trenches. "It’s about the man next to you. That’s it. That’s all
it is."
In a very real sense, that’s all "Black Hawk Down" is about, too. |
