One of the most anticipated films of the year arrived in town last Friday. What’s
different about this one is that Black Hawk Down was probably looked forward
to by people who had read the original book by Mark Bowden more than by film fans
per se. It’s no wonder. The print version of Black Hawk Down was a masterpiece
of reportage in which Bowden did the near-impossible, creating a taut, page-turning
narrative out of an event (a deadly 1993 firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia) that
was completely chaotic at best. Observers of the national political scene have
been chomping at the bit over this one, too, because of the natural emotional
links, in these post-9/11 times, to soldiers currently in Afghanistan — and to
those who, if White House hints are reliable, may be going back in to Somalia
in the future. The early film reviews have been mixed. Some critics, including
CL’s Matt Brunson, say the film is too much techno-action and too little
character development. Others say it’s a brilliant, if grueling, depiction of
heroism. Bowden’s book certainly emphasized the many true tales of individual
heroism that took place in Mogadishu rather than the immediate military or political
implications of the battle. Above all, it was a story of men in a desperate situation
trying to help each other get out of it. But considering our changed worldwide
political situation, as well as the very real possibility of a return to Mogadishu,
moviegoers’ reactions can’t be the same as readers’ were a couple of years ago.
Some may leave the theater teary-eyed with patriotism, others just as teary-eyed
over the futile waste of it all. What’s needed more than anything else is context.
Why were these soldiers in Somalia to begin with? Why did much of the city stand
up in a violent rebellion against them? Critics disagree whether the filmmakers
provide enough context to lift the movie above the level of an intense shoot-em-up.
Below, we give two different views of Black Hawk Down: Matt Brunson’s review
of the film, and journalist Danny Schechter’s view that the movie serves as a
recruitment film for future Third World engagements.
— John Grooms
Under Fire
Fact-based film bombards viewers into submission
By Matt Brunson
While September’s terrorist attacks forced studios to hold a couple
of fall releases until this year — Collateral Damage for its terrorism
plotline, Big Trouble for its climax involving a bomb on a plane — a
few entrepreneurial filmmakers saw the tragedy as an opportunity to move up
the release dates of select pictures in order to make some money off the jingoistic
fervor. First up was November’s Behind Enemy Lines, basically a cheerleader
rally set in Bosnia and so inconsequential a film that even 1942’s all-but-forgotten
WWII comedy Star Spangled Rhythm will have a more robust shelflife in
the long run. And now comes Black Hawk Down, which, given its limited-release
pattern (it opened in NY and LA in December) and “For Your Consideration” Oscar
ads in the trade publications, is gunning for award glory as well as box office
riches.
I suppose it’s possible this adaptation of Mark Bowden’s best-selling novel
could score a Best Picture nomination — the critics at Time, Newsweek and USA Today are among its most ardent supporters — but more likely it
will be overlooked for motion pictures that come closer to expanding the parameters
of their respective genres, be it the musical (Moulin Rouge), the murder-mystery
(Mulholland Drive), or something else. Black Hawk Down, by comparison,
adds precious little to the long line of Hollywood war pictures — on the contrary,
the movie seems to exist in a vacuum or bubble, hermetically sealed off from the
emotional pull that helped define most of the great war flicks.
As in Bowen’s fact-based book, the movie centers on the 1993 mission of a
crack team of US soldiers to enter the civil-war-torn city of Mogadishu, Somalia,
and snatch a pair of key aides to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. But what initially
appeared to the soldiers to be an in-and-out assignment quickly turned disastrous,
resulting in two downed Black Hawk helicopters and scores of US soldiers doing
their best to remain alive long enough for their comrades to rescue them.
Aside from the obligatory opening scrawl, the movie fails to provide much
in the way of context, either the country’s politics or recent history (including
US involvement in the region); that may not sound like a big deal — after all,
WWII yarns like Where Eagles Dare or The Dirty Dozen didn’t exactly
spend any of their running times tracing Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy — but the
unfamiliarity of this conflict to most Americans would dictate that this material
at least be placed in some sort of barebones context (compare this to 1999’s
looking-better-every-day Three Kings, the Gulf War drama that repeatedly
addressed difficult issues in the middle of its gold heist plotline).
Still, more detrimental to the movie’s success is that none of the film’s
key contributors — director Ridley Scott (Gladiator), producer Jerry
Bruckheimer (Top Gun) or novice screenwriter Ken Nolan — deemed it important
to place any stock in their cast of characters. Obviously, Scott et al wanted
to recreate the wartime experience in all its shell-shocked urgency rather than
fashion a more traditional (read: narrative-driven) movie, but in this instance,
it would have been possible for the makers to have their cake and eat it, too.
Steven Spielberg and scripter Robert Rodat took flak from a small army of nit-pickers
for largely placing archetypes at the center of Saving Private Ryan,
but their decision gave each individual soldier a vibrant, distinct personality
and never once interfered with the you-are-there verisimilitude of the combat
scenes (especially the Normandy Beach opening, the style of which Black Hawk
Down spends most of its running time slavishly copying).
This new film, on the other hand, is so disinterested in its characters, it’s
sometimes impossible to tell the players apart. Admittedly, a few recognizable
mugs pepper the proceedings: Pearl Harbor‘s Josh Hartnett as the group
“idealist” (in other words, Charlie Sheen’s old Platoon role); Tom Sizemore
in a reprisal of his Saving Private Ryan part as the gruff vet; Sam Shepard
as the commander who watches the turn of events from military HQ (his isolated
scenes, randomly popping up here and there, reminded me of how footage of Raymond
Burr was clumsily inserted into existing Japanese prints of Godzilla for the film’s US debut back in the 50s); and Gabriel Casseus as the unit’s
sole black member (whether there really was one black soldier on the assignment
— or whether the character was added to the film in an attempt to defuse the
spectacle of an all-white army mowing down the all-black opposition — is unknown
to me). For the most part, though, similar-looking actors with identical buzz
cuts, identical pearly whites and identical snatches of dialogue blanket the
sets, and it becomes impossible to identify or empathize with them as individuals
since their primary function seems to be as anonymous slabs of American fortitude.
Knocking Black Hawk Down is by no means the same as knocking the patriotic
spirit. But for Scott and Bruckheimer to parade their picture around as a morale-booster
is disingenuous, considering that the military hardware here gets better screen
treatment than the characters. (I read somewhere that someone — maybe a crew
member, maybe a reporter — cooed about how in one scene we get to see a close-up
of all the spent shells piling up on the ground as a soldier blasts away, as
if that were a first in the annals of film history. Big deal: I vividly recall
seeing an identical shot in one of those dopey Rambo movies in the 80s.)
I have no doubt that, unlike the makers of Behind Enemy Lines, the folks
behind Black Hawk Down had some good intentions in mind; it’s just too
bad they decided to honor the machines rather than the men.
BLACK HAWK DOWN
RATING (out of four):
Black Hawk — and Truth —
Down
By Danny Schechter
I went to a war last night, and for two and a half hours had my adrenaline
pumped and my patriotic heart strings tugged by US soldiers in battle, bravely
tracking down and trying to capture the enemy. No it wasn’t Osama, because the
movie which felt like it might have taken place in the rubble of Kabul was actually
a replay of the battle of Mogadishu in l993. The film is Black Hawk Down,
an account of elite Ranger and Delta force soldiers fighting the good fight.
Their mission, the publicity flyer tells us, “to capture several top lieutenants
of the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, as part of a strategy to quell the
civil war and famine that is ravaging that country.” The action is non-stop;
only the outcome is disastrous. Nineteen Americans were killed along with l,000
Somalis before US forces were withdrawn in an intervention that started nobly
and ended in one of the bloodiest messes you can imagine.
The movie showed what the TV news of the current Afghani war has not: actual
combat, and the feelings of those engaged in it. You see soldiers fighting with
great courage, but they are not motivated by a cause or an ideology; they fight
to protect each other, for personal survival. Obvious is that US forces have a
clear advantage in terms of technology, helicopters, communications, etc. But
in the end they are defeated by the determination of a far less organized urban
guerilla force that sees itself defending its hometown against a foreign intervention.
And like the TV news accounts of Afghanistan, the movie comes to us largely context-free,
with a twisted and distorted perspective that simplifies that conflict beyond
recognition.
Black Hawk Down also seems part of a propaganda strategy aimed at Americans,
not people overseas where it is unlikely to win many hearts and minds. Notes
Larry Chin in the Online Journal: “True to its post-9/11 government-sanctioned
role as US war propaganda headquarters, Hollywood has released Black Hawk
Down, a fictionalized account of a tragic 1993 US raid in Somalia. The Pentagon
assisted with the production, pleased for an opportunity to ‘set the record
straight.’ The film, though, is a lie that compounds the original lie that was
the operation itself.”
Forget the revelations that one of the story’s big heroes, in real life, later
gets convicted as a rapist. Forget the dramatization formulas. Just think about
the impression left with the audience, and how that perception has little to
do with reality. After watching the film, which made me uncomfortable because
it showed how senseless the US policy was as well as how ineffective, I also
realized how little it conveyed what really happened in that tortured land.
The film starts with signposts — literally, writing on the screen, a few
short paragraphs, to remind us what happened. The problem is this: the information
is false. It implies, for example, that US troops were sent to Somalia to feed
the hungry. Maybe the initial shipments of troops were, as part of a UN force,
but not by the time the Black Hawk Down disaster took place.
In David Halberstam’s new book, War in a Time of Peace, which recounts
the Somalian mishap in some depth, the Defense Secretary told an associate,
“We’re sending the Rangers to Somalia. We are not going to be able to control
them. They are like overtrained pit bulls. No one controls them.” Doesn’t sound
much like a charity mission, does it? The Rangers were indeed sent with great
fanfare, to hunt and capture Aidid. Their mission failed.
Halberstam’s book mentions, but does not detail, the bloody background: The
massive crimes of the Somali dictator Siad Barre, who the US backed and who
Somali warlord Mohamad Farrah Aidid ejected. Halberstam also describes the American
hatred for Somalis, expressed in the much-bandied phrase, “The only good Somali
is a dead Somali.” Is it any wonder Somalis fought back? (In the movie, the
battle looks like a racial war, with virtually all-white US forces going mano-a-mano
with an all-black city.) Halberstam reveals how these forces made arrogant assumptions
in Somalia, underestimating the resistance, and how the urban “battlefield became
a horror. . .a major league CNN-era disaster.”
You can read Halberstam’s book, and many others, if you want to know more.
But the point is that the romanticization of our modern warriors all too often
misses the underlying political dimension of a conflict. On January 7 it was
reported that Green Beret Sgt. Nathan Ross Chapman, who was just killed in Afghanistan,
may have been set up by so-called anti-Taliban allies. In Somalia, we intervened
in the domestic affairs and conflicts of another society. What started as a
war on hunger became a war on Aidid. We became warlords ourselves. In Afghanistan
a war against terror became a war against the government, and may have put in
power people who are as ruthless as the ones who were displaced.
Black Hawk Down is an action movie that tries to turn a US defeat into
a victory by encouraging you to identify with the men who fought their way out
of an urban conflagration not of their making. But with Somalia looming as a
possible next target in the war against terror, Black Hawk Down may turn
into a recruiting film for revenge. While Al Qaeda isn’t visible in the film,
there is evidence that they, too, were involved in the background of the events
in l993, stirring up the violence and helping train the warlord militias.
Danny Schechter is executive editor of MediaChannel. *
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2002.
