Black Hawk Down (2001)

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The shadow of September 11 will not always
hang over the movies, but as I watched Ridley Scott’s Black
Hawk Down it seemed to be everywhere: an ominous column of
smoke rising from a city skyline; people watching helplessly via
video screens as a catastrophe unfolds before their eyes in real
time; enemies striking an unexpected and terrible blow that seems
to be as bad as anything can possibly be — followed by a second,
equally terrible blow. Two helicopters down in the streets of
Mogadishu; two towers down in the streets of Manhattan.

Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/Spiritual Value

Age Appropriateness

MPAA Rating

Caveat Spectator

What is it that a film like this offers us in times like
these? Understanding? Catharsis? Perspective? The words seem
irrelevant. Black Hawk Down is the story of a disaster: an
operation that began as a supposedly routine, 30-minute
snatch-and-grab aimed at capturing high-ranking enemy officers,
but spiraled out of control into a desperate 15-hour ground war
merely to survive and escape. Some 120 American troops were
engaged by thousands of Somali militia, civilians, even women and
children — a whole city, really. It was the longest, largest
firefight for American troops since Vietnam; eighteen Americans,
and over 500 Somalis, were slain, and any number on both sides
wounded.

A few subtitles explain briefly the reasons for the American
presence in Somalia in 1993. They seem to be good reasons. The
country was stricken by terrible famine, thousands of Somalis
were dying of starvation, and U.N. food shipments were being
routinely waylaid by warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who opposed
U.N. involvement and sought to maintain his own power.

At the same time, the film suggests that American resolve
wasn’t what it should have been: The Clinton administration
initially alloted a mere three weeks for the military to restore
order, and denied requests for armored vehicles and other
ordnance.

We also gather that the enemy may have been underestimated. As
the powerful Black Hawks swoop in low toward Mogadishu, we see a
young Somali boy watching from a rooftop vantage point — then
scrambling down with a phone in his hand, making a call that will
bring out militia fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenade
lauchers capable of crippling a Black Hawk.

The film hints, too, at the long-term consequences of the
disaster: President Clinton, unwilling to risk further loss of
American life, immediately called off the humanitarian mission
and pulled the troops out of the ongoing Somalian conflict.
Afterwards, the prospect of sending troops into other foreign
trouble zones (e.g., Rwanda, Zaire, Bosnia) faced a chilly
reception in Washington — and here again we can’t help seeing the
specter of September 11, which brought home with devastating
force the impossibility of withdrawing from the world’s
problems.

But all of that in on the periphery here. Ridley Scott’s film — like the acclaimed newspaper serial story by Mark Bowden on which it is
based — is essentially concerned with the events themselves, not
with interpretation or commentary. It’s a study in logistics: Its
concerns are what, where, and when, not so much who or why.

Black Hawk Down isn’t particularly interested with its
subjects as characters in a film, which is all to the good. Like
Steven Spielberg with Schindler’s List and Amistad, Scott respects his material by
depicting it impersonally, with the focus on the event itself
rather than some drama of irrelevant "characters" (cf.
Titanic or Pearl
Harbor).

In fact, Black Hawk Down is the kind of war picture one
might have imagined Spielberg himself making, before he actually
did make Saving Private
Ryan, a film that begins with the anonymity of its famous
opening battle sequence before morphing into a sentimental
melodrama about characters. In a way, Black Hawk Down is
the anti-Ryan: It begins with a lengthy, largely
unnecessary prologue feebling attempting to establish
one-dimensional characters, then kicks into high gear with the
onset of the doomed mission. In my book, it’s a better balance, a
purer sort of war picture.

When I reviewed Pearl
Harbor, I observed that the big, bloated attack sequence
at the film’s center was nearly twice as long as the opening
sequence in Ryan, and
expressed skepticism whether that kind of intense battle action
could ever be sustained for much longer than the twenty or so
minutes alloted in Spielberg’s film.

Now, having seen Black Hawk Down, I find that it can,
if it has structure and clarity. In Scott’s hands, battle isn’t
reduced to an exercise in mere chaos or an assemblage of violent
incident, but comes as a series of problems to be solved,
obstacles to be negotiated, complications to be dealt with.
Watching events unfold, we have a basic sense of where people are
in relation to one another, where they need to get to, and so on,
which at any given moment seems to be all that matters.

Scott is a superb visual stylist, and his films are always
interesting to look at (even though his last two, Gladiator and Hannibal, weren’t great films). When
he shoots the omimous Black Hawks prowling the airspace above the
rooftops from the point of view of militiamen running through
buildings and down alleyways, it’s like watching great white
sharks drifting over a coral reef while their prey skulk about
amid the coral.

Though Scott perhaps wisely refrained from reproducing the
most hauntingly familiar image from the action in Somalia — that
of a dead American Ranger being dragged through the streets by
jubilant Somalis — the images he creates are almost as
devastating, and seem just as real.

Scott also finds moments of terrible humor in the ghastly
slapstick of war: In one scene, a Ranger slips and falls as he
exits a building — inadvertently ducking beneath a hail of
bullets from an ambusher’s gun. The ambusher is a young boy. His
gunfire finds another target: a Somali man standing on the other
side of the doorway who, judging from the boy’s anguished
reaction, may be the boy’s father.

Despite fleeting moments such as this, which briefly humanize
the enemy, many critics have complained that the Somalis are
little more than pop-up targets. Yet that’s precisely what what
one Ranger told Bowden it was really like, comparing the enemy to
"silhouettes at target practice." Others have wrung their hands
over the vision of hundreds of black Africans being blown away by
a crew of (predominantly) white Americans. Yet unless one wishes
to argue that this particular event ought not to have been
depicted in film — or that the screenplay ought to have imposed a
kind of retroactive affirmative action on the soldiers — I fail
to see exactly what is being said. Such objections seem to me as
misguided as complaints about lack of "characterization" among
the soldiers.

Even some of the clichéd dialogue, when there was room
for it, had for me the ring of truth. When a dying soldier asked
a comrade to deliver a message to his loved ones — prompting the
inevitable, time-honored reply, "You’ll tell them yourself" — I
couldn’t help feeling that this lie must actually be uttered on
battlefields all the time.

The film inevitably omits vivid details from Mark Bowden’s
story. On the first page of the Inquirer series we read
that Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann (Josh Harnett) went to Mass
the morning of the botched operation, and uttered Hail Marys as
his men began roping out of the helicopter onto the street below.
Later we read about how, when one pilot was captured, the Somalis
(fearful of tiny transmitters in his clothing) began to strip
him, but were unable to work the unfamiliar plastic snaps on his
gear, until the pilot helped them open them.

Yet the broad outlines of the story and even many specific
details are here, straight out of Bowden. If Scott can’t include
the whole wealth of detail Bowden brought to the story, he
compensates with the greater visual and auditory immediacy of his
medium, bringing us as close as possible to what those soldiers
went through in that two-day period in October 1993. It’s a
harrowing, unforgettable experience, one unlike any other war
picture that has ever been made.