Flak Magazine: Review of Black Hawk Down, 2-7-02

Black Hawk Down, the new Ridley Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer war film, is a brain-deadening shoot-'em-up whose level of violence makes any Sam Peckinpah movie look like "Sesame Street" in comparison. With Jimi Hendrix blasting on the soundtrack and hundreds of faceless Somalis falling dead, the good guys are hard to root for. After the fireworks begin, numbing rapid-fire gunplay and blown-to-bits body parts leave the emotional impression of a violent video game.

Scott's track record for Hollywood success is impressive: Alien, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Hannibal. Teamed with blockbuster producer Bruckheimer, he has created battle scenes with skill and precision. These graphic episodes and the poetic shots of Black Hawk helicopters in formation over the Black Sea will get the creative staff invited to the Oscars.

But the emotional toll of war that Full Metal Jacket and The Thin Red Line tried to express is where Black Hawk Down fears to go. The story of unlimited heroism in the face of overwhelming tragedy was scripted by Ken Nolan from the book by Mark Bowden, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who covered what is now known as the Battle of the Black Sea — a 1993 Mogadishu incident where 18 US servicemen and hundreds of Somalis lost their lives.

The premise is set up in the first five minutes: Washington wants to get the bad warlord who is stealing food and relief aid from the victims of the horrific famine that has taken a savage toll on the people of Somalia. A noble cause, but just what is a warlord? Who are these menaces that live in Somalia and other lawless places? Black Hawk Down could have tried to answer the question by putting a face to the warlord Muhammad Farah Aidid. But Nolan and Scott choose to leave Aidid out of the picture, substituting instead thousands of his well-armed henchmen and Somali children, referred to as "sammies" and "skinnies" by the US forces. Blinders on, Black Hawk Down comes shamefully close to depicting what looks like an all-white police force battling against a gang of black criminals.

Western culture's original war story, Homer's "Iliad," set the bar high with its take on the Yin and the Yang of the Trojan War. The ancient story could not be more modern in its characters' struggle for justice and understanding during times of war. Defeated and killed by Achilles on the battlefield at Troy, Hector has his body dragged back to the Greek camps and left to the dogs. When Hector's father asks for his body and a proper burial, Achilles recognizes how his own father would have felt and grants the request. It's a scene recalled by the sickening video taken of dead US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, but the events leading up to that video are re-created in the film with no texture or complexity.

In the end, the bravery of the soldiers is not in doubt, but Scott fails to make the slightest extrapolation about the nature of war in general or this battle in particular. His film is narrowly focused on the scope of tactical military maneuvers. There isn't a breath of understanding about the efforts to reduce the famine except for a short opening montage of a relief truck full of grain being hijacked by armed henchmen. The rest of the film boils down to the Somalis and the US forces taking deadly target practice at one another.

Black Hawk Down has led the tab on box office receipts for three weeks running. It pushes the envelope of violent realism to such extremes that it inadvertently asks us the same questions as Homer's epic poem: How far will we go in war and which terrible act will be an atrocity too far?

— Bill Tivenan (tivenan at hotmail dot com)