"Black Hawk Down": One of the best, most insightful war films ever made

Black Hawk Down
(Ridley Scott, 2001)

4 stars

Watching Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” is like taking the endurance test from Hell. It throws us right in the middle of the desperate fifteen hour struggle for survival that took place on October 3, 1993, when two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down over Mogadishu, Somalia, leaving more than a hundred Army Rangers trapped under siege. For two solid hours, we’re trapped under this deafening assault of gunfire and explosions that never, ever lets up, not even for a moment. We hear nothing but battle, and see nothing but blood.

Scott pulls no punches; he wants “Black Hawk Down” to be the most realistic representation of battle ever put on screen. And he certainly succeeds on a visual level. (In one scene, a rocket blows a man clear in half; we see his intestines lying on the ground beside him. Even “Saving Private Ryan” wasn't that brutal.) But anyone can bombard us with carnage; what makes “Black Hawk Down” special is how Scott uses film grammar, in addition to the sights and sounds of battle, to make us feel what it must have been like to be caught up in this desperate, heated and unexpected struggle for survival. (And he did it so well that he earned himself an Oscar nomination for Best Director.)

His strategy is to make the battle scenes incomprehensible, so not only are they big, loud and bloody, but they're impossible to follow. Shots come and go so fast that every event is reduced to little more than a shapeless blur, you can’t tell the difference between any of the soldiers and since there’s no attempt at establishing any sort of geography, we never know where anyone is or where they’re going. It initially seems like a flaw. (“You’d think," complains Jeremiah Kipp of filmcritic.com, "we’d at least have some small understanding of what was going on”). But think – how did the soldiers feel? Do you think things made sense to them? Were they sure and confident? Because we’ve been conditioned by generations of war movies to expect things to be coherent, we try desperately to make sense out of the senseless. We become as confused, aggravated and frustrated as the men we’re watching.

That’s not sloppy filmmaking, that’s realism. The same thing goes for a lot of other decisions, like the ones concerning the lack of political context (“Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics goes right out the window,” says one soldier) and character. “Black Hawk Down” takes the “United 93” approach to character: There’s no backstory or depth; all we have to go on is a name and a face. It’s not a flaw: There’s no time for deep reflection and inspired monologues when bullets were whizzing past your head.

I’ve always been confused by critics who’ve attacked this movie as "racist." Yes, it’s true that the Somali are portrayed as a screaming mass of bloodthirsty savages, but stop and think for a second. The story is about besieged Americans trapped under siege; every Somali they see wants to kill them. Do you think that between running for cover, they were telling themselves, “Hey, I bet there are a lot of good people in that screaming mass?” Of course not. That’s not racism, it’s perspective.

“Black Hawk Down” isn’t perfect. "Pearl Harbor" producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s fingerprints are all over this movie. There’s a lot of very, very cheesy dialogue (“I’m here to kick some ass!”), stuff like a militia leader who serves as the villain in a story that doesn’t need one and a subplot about the deaf soldier that’s supposed to be funny, but is really just offensive. (Imagine if Paul Greengrass had added comic relief to “United 93”, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of what’s going on here.) Thankfully, Scott’s more radical vision dominates the picture.

You may be asking what’s the point? Why would anyone ever want to subject themselves to such a brutal experience? Because great films enlighten us. My mom’s cousin is a major in the Army, and he served a year in Iraq. He was never trapped behind enemy lines, but he and his company took fire every night. He lived under a daily fear of being killed. I can’t imagine what that must have been like, but at least now I have an idea.