Black Hawk Down review
posted on 14 December 2007
Black Hawk Down is one of the most stark, brutal and realistic war movies ever made. That, and it's the best "First Person Shooter" adaptation ever made. I didn't know whether to cheer, cry or lunge for my Playstation controller.
There are essentially two types of war film: the ones that try to capture the true nature of violent warfare, and the ones that use a wartime backdrop to tell a drama tale or adventure saga. Ridley Scott basically melds these two classes together and comes up with something new: the fact-based documentary-style action-adventure drama video game. While Black Hawk Down may not be one of the best war films ever made, it is one of the most realistic. This movie is not for the faint of heart.
Black Hawk Down is free of all the pre-packaged requirements that most war films choose to showcase. Absent is the heavy-handed metaphor of The Thin Red Line, the allegorical religion of Platoon and the moronic posturing of Pearl Harbor. Director Ridley Scott clearly wants this film to do one thing: drop the audience in the center of a massive, confusing and ultimately meaningless battlefield. Aside from a few indulgent moments and stilted exchanges, Scott succeeds overwhelmingly.
Without any extra implied subtext, the onus here is simply on the battle at hand. Screenwriters Steve Zaillian and Ken Nolan (working from Mark Bowden's book) seem to have historical accuracy as their main priority, and if the film isn't entirely accurate, it's damn close enough. The audience is briefly introduced to a collection of soliders on a peace-keeping mission in Somalia. (While some seem to feel that the overall lack of character development is a shortcoming, I think the general "facelessness" of most characters is quite intentional.) The latest mission is to abduct two high-ranking officials in the city of Mogidishu. What began as a simple "in-and-out" extraction turned into an brutal miniature war.
Although Black Hawk Down doesn't feature many "starring roles", the film is a who's who of popular character actors. Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge!), Sam Shepard (The Pledge), Ron Eldard (Deep Impact), Tom Sizemore (The Relic), William Fichtner (The Perfect Storm), Richard Tyson (Three O'Clock High), Danny Hoch (Bamboozled), Jeremy Piven (Very Bad Things) and Orlando Bloom (Lord of the Rings) all deliver the goods in roles of varying size, while Josh Hartnett (The Faculty) is surpisingly strong as a newly appointed Seargent. The two standouts in the cast are Eric Bana (Chopper) as a special forces loner and Jason Isaacs (The Patriot) as the mercilessly devoted Captain Steele.
If Black Hawk Down stumbles in one respect, it's that of simple restraint. I'm not saying that the horrors of warfare should be muted in any way, but how many lingering shots of a soldier's exploded leg do we need to see? In the film's most brutal sequence, an impromptu battlefield surgery takes place. Although it's important that the audience feel the horror and pain of these soldiers, it's a tough trick to pull off when everyone's looking away. I've no aversion to gore, but overkill of any kind mars a scene. Some of the action scenes also could have used some clearer delineation: If total realism is what Scott was going for, perhaps his faceless army of villains could have been charcterized a bit less cartoonishly. (The non-stop deluge of Somalian attackers most closely resembles Romero's mindless zombie army from Dawn of the Dead.)
Of course no movie could tell this tale precisely how it happened, but Black Hawk Down gets as close to the battlefield as I ever hope to be. The non-stop explosions and carnage may be a bit much for some, but anyone familiar with the computer games Doom, Quake or Unreal will have an ass-kickin' time. So why did I feel so guilty when I got that "action-movie rush" from all the best "kill" scenes?