"It's just war" (Black Hawk Down (2 DVDs))

Member Name: george_lazenby

Product:	Black Hawk Down (2 DVDs)
Date:	21/01/02 (112 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Terrifying, convincing, not as gung-ho as expected

Disadvantages: Too gory for some, exhausting

First things first - a man is blown in half; another man is blown apart before your very eyes; soldiers get shot in the neck, the face, the back, and there is a horribly explicit battlefield operation. It's a staggeringly incoherent film, with director Ridley Scott eschewing the norms of characterisation by presenting his soldiers as utterly ordinary, with only a few central characters having much to distinguish them: Eric Bana plays the cynical hard-case, Ewan MacGregor the desk-job soldier promoted to the battlefield at the last minute, Josh Hartnett is the sensitive commander, but in the end, with their helmets on, spattered with blood and muck and surrounded by mayhem, you may struggle to remember them. There are a lot of people who just plain won't like this movie - it's violent, loud and savage.

But who cares - this is one of the best war movies released in the last ten years. The plot of the film is barely relevant, but here it is. More or less based on truth, 'Black Hawk Down' is about the situation in the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu in 1993, when warlord General Aidid started to target US soldiers. Going into the city to capture some of Aidid's sidekicks in an operation intended to last about 30 minutes, a team of US soldiers were ambushed by a massive onslaught of Aidid's militia.

As it happens, our old friend Osama bin Laden was probably involved in planning the ambush, and the reason why this bloody movie is in cinemas now, rather than in March, was because the producers realised that, though it was essentially about an American faliure, it shows the US Army with right on its side, and depicts something (war in the third world) which for one reason or another is definitely on the public's mind just now.

Before the screening, in the adverts, there was a '12' rated recruitment ad for the Royal Marines, one which depicts a recruit having to crawl through an underwater tunnel, with the sl
ightly smug tagline that 99.99% need not apply. Having watched 'Black Hawk Down', I'm quite happy not to be in the 0.01% who will be shipped out to have their faces blown off in a war they don't understand, and I doubt the Marines will consider their money well spent if they're attempting to recruit an audience who have seen 'Black Hawk Down'.

There is a story here - two helicopters are downed, and the convoys of road vehicles are battered. Soldiers are cut off - or left behind - until there are pockets of US forces scattered around the city. The aim is for the men on the ground to check for survivors in the choppers, recover the corpses, and then gather in one place to be evacuated. But Scott is deliberately not keeping you up to date with the way in which this mission is going - either you can keep up, or you can't. Part of the point is the way in which planning and coherence go out of the window, and so the chaos, the improvised way in which the soldiers work is the structure.

The point of this film is to demonstrate what war is like for the grunt, the guy who is being shot at, and doing the shooting. Scott is a great one for huge expansive shots, blood-red sunsets, but this film is a lot tighter, a lot more ground level than most of his movies. The main criticism you could level at every one of his films is that they are emotionally cold, his perspective all too often that of a god looking down on his creatures - for the first time, Scott is shooting at ground level, getting his hands dirty if you like.

So what you get is the blood splashing the camera, the soil and rubble crashing down on you as the rockets crash down, and worst of all, you are pummelled by an angry crowd intent on beating you to death. With explosions left, right and centre, a very high factor and bullets sprayed in every scene, it's an exhausting experience, but probably as close most of us will every come to knowing what it's
like to being on a battlefield.

The film does have a positive spin, and sometimes the politics are slightly naïve. Only in a couple of scenes do Somali characters get to point out the inanity of the American involvement in Somalia, and a final caption informs you that while 19 Americans died, while 1000 Somalis lost their lives. The Africans are liberally mown down, and you don't really get much of a sense of what they are doing, or what motivates them. Though there's some impatience with the rules of engagement, and a slightly wary attitude towards the UN, there's none of the moronic, immature approach that 'Behind Enemy Lines' extends towards NATO. Ironically, the scene which seems most inflammatory, when a US soldier is killed and then stripped by the crowd, actually happened, except that Scott spares you the scene in which the man's naked body was dragged through the streets.

Ultimately, it's not as complicated as a film like 'Three Kings', a savage indictment of the US adventure in the Gulf War, but it doesn't do too much (until the last scene) to glorify killing or fighting. Instead, what it depicts the US army for what it is, a bunch of ordinary men attempting to do their job in extraordinary circumstances, and probably let down by their leaders, whose motives are obscure. 'Black Hawk Down' is grimy, nasty and difficult to follow - just read a Wilfred Owen poem and you'll see that in this, it's getting pretty close to the truth.

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