Black Hawk Down

BLACK HAWK DOWN

Rating: B+

Harrowing battle scenes stand out in an otherwise very familiar entry.

Black Hawk Down relates the true story of an abortive U.S. raid in Somalia in 1993. U.S. troops were there as part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission to prevent local warlords from interfering with efforts to aid thousands of starving citizens. Events spiraled out of control when an Army Black Hawk helicopter was shot down over Mogadishu, and nearly 100 Army Rangers and Delta Force troops found themselves surrounded by thousands of hostile guerrillas.

Fully 90% of this movie consists of the soldiers (led by Josh Hartnett and Tom Sizemore, among others) winding their way through the war-torn streets of Mogadishu as they exchange gunfire with Somali snipers. The scenes are gripping and filled with tension, but after a while they all start to look the same. Occasionally, there's a break to allow those who made it back to safety to stand tall, spout "No one gets left behind," and catch the next humvee back into battle. I don't mean to belittle the bravery of the soldiers involved in the actual event; I've no doubt such selfless heroism really occurred. At the same time, the movie keeps bludgeoning us over the head with scene after scene of this, until it starts to taste like jingoistic propaganda.

Comparisons to Platoon and Saving Private Ryan are inevitable, especially since the film borrows so freely from the story structures of both. We meet the soldiers, learn a little bit about their lives back home, then watch as they enter battle and endure horrific circumstances. And, of course, not all of them make it back. As in Platoon, we learn many of the soldiers don't believe in their mission, and that there's friction between different factions in our armed forces. As in Saving Private Ryan, the men get separated into small groups during the heat of battle, and each experiences strangely ironic and moving events involving life and death. But I never found myself caring about the characters in Black Hawk Down the way I did in Platoon. And the situations seem a lot more forced and artificial.

Which is not to say we're spared from the reality of the blood and gore of battle. Far from it - director Ridley Scott seems to revel in showing us scenes which drive home the horrible effects of men firing exploding objects at one another. I guess I already knew going in that war is hell, or at least I strongly suspected it. All Scott's fascination with gore accomplishes is to momentarily turn the film into a farcical theater of the grotesque. I'm not exaggerating when I say the woman next to me giggled all the way through a scene involving a bloody leg operation. Of course, there will be those (as there were with Saving Private Ryan) who will view the scenes of dismembered limbs as an epiphany that, gee, maybe war is violent after all, and who'll praise the film to high heaven as an outstanding cinematic achievement for stating what should really be pretty obvious. Fortunately, you and I both know that "powerful filmmaking" requires a lot more than bloody prosthetics.

It's been said all films are political, both in the views they state explicitly, and those they indirectly imply. Here, Scott does raise the question of whether the U.S. forces should have been meddling in what was essentially a civil war in Somalia, but he wisely doesn't make a major issue of it. (Of course, the hundreds of thousands of Somalian citizens who were starving and being used as pawns by the warring factions were completely innocent victims.) I can sympathize with both sides of the argument, but if Scott had adopted a definite "we never should have been there" attitude, the film would have suffered for it. Instead, he chooses to focus on the experiences of the soldiers, and leaves the politics for another day.