Caught in a Trap

Black Hawk Down
(****)

Sasha Stone
Mirror Film Critic

   For Ridley Scott fans who were disappointed with “Gladiator,” we get our beloved director back with “Black Hawk Down,” one of the best films of the year, and certainly of Scott’s esteemed career. The Directors Guild agrees, having just nominated Scott for Best Director of the year.
   Most surprising is that the film’s producer is Jerry Bruckheimer, not known for his subtlety, but rather for producing films depicting girls in short skirts cavorting with cocky young studs in the midst of testosterone-fueled blood and guts. It’s as if Bruckheimer went down the Yellow Brick Road, paid the Wizard of Oz a visit and got himself a brain, a heart and the nerve. This film should scrape Bruckheimer clean. But it does a lot more than that.
   “Black Hawk Down” should not be substituted for the Mark Bowden book on which it is based, like two other notable releases this year, “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter,” but should be taken as a companion piece. Unlike the aforementioned films, however, “Black Hawk Down” works as well on its own, as a study in combat, as a great war film, as an expression of the country’s mood after 9/11.
   Of course, “Black Hawk” is based on true events and doesn’t have the luxury fiction affords. If it did, we might have seen more of Hollywood’s brand of heroism — go in, kick butt and make us all feel safe. Safe is not what we feel watching this film, which, as we now know, is not what we should feel.
   “Black Hawk Down” tells the story of the ill-fated U.S. plan to drop some troops into Somalia to defeat and kill the powerful warlord Aideed. But we underestimated our enemy and overestimated our own power. The special forces unit expected the “smash and grab” job to be over within an hour, instead, the mission devolved into a 19-hour odyssey whose sole purpose became, simply to “leave no man behind.”
   The trouble starts when the local militia is tipped off to the unit’s arrival (they burn tires to spread the word) and suddenly fighters are everywhere shooting high-powered rockets at the choppers, ultimately downing two. Getting the men out of those downed birds is what the film concerns itself with for the next two and a half grueling hours.
   In the end, the mission will leave 1,000 Somalis and 19 American soldiers dead, and will impact the future of America’s military operations forever. (It’s important that this piece of information is imparted to the audience. We think it’s bad 19 of ours died, but they lost 1,000.)
   Black Hawk Down never hits a false note, not even the handful of times where characters must speak the themes of the film. When one of the soldiers admits he’s too afraid to go back into the fray, he is told that it’s what he does at that moment that makes the difference. In another film, say, “Pearl Harbor,” that line would get a chuckle or two. Not here.
   Scott does a great job bringing to life infamous moments from the mission -- the ones you might have heard on the Frontline special or read in the book -- a soldier being dragged through the street, an old Somali man carrying his dead child, oblivious to what is going on around him, a captured soldier with beat-up face, swollen eyes, and dazed expression, which seemed to epitomize that ill-fated military disaster.
   Much credit must be given to Scott’s team, chief among them his cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, who comes at the action fiercely and unflinchingly. Hans Zimmer’s score is the best of the year, hands down, and it is helped by a fabulous soundtrack, including the agonizingly accurate Elvis Presley song, “Suspicious Minds.” The actors take it to heights unknown, especially Josh Hartnett, who also reinvents himself by scraping off the “Pearl Harbor” mud. Sam Shepard is pitch-perfect as Major General William Garrison, who took full responsibility for the tragedy in Mogadishu. But this film belongs to its director, Ridley Scott, who seems, for the first time in many years, to have something he wants to say and says it with the kind of passionate conviction films today often lack.
   “Black Hawk Down” shares a lot with the Bosnian film “No Man’s Land.” One is satirical and one is literal, but both feature soldiers whose lives are at stake from commands coming from high places, from masters of war who aren’t the ones taking bullets. Both films feature a fairly flaccid United Nations force, that arrives in tanks to help “fix the problem.” These are not films to avoid in light of recent events, rather, they prove, once again, that in times of crisis we turn to art for greater understanding, or, if nothing else, for the opportunity to grieve.
   Contrary to the opinions of some critics, “Black Hawk Down” did not strike me as jingoistic or even patriotic in the traditional sense of the word. There is no Rambo, there is no Dirty Harry — there are only flesh and blood makeshift heroes just doing their job. Sound familiar? Indeed, this is exactly how we all felt on September 11. We were stunned that America couldn’t fight back. (That is, until we flattened Afghanistan.) But as is pointed out so clearly in this film, we can’t think that if we took out Aideed the rest of the militia would simply have put down their weapons. We are fighting something we simply do not understand. In the end, it seems likely, that for all of our grand hopes of “nation building,” the future of warfare will come down to what the film comes down to: protecting the person standing next to you.
   For a glimpse of the horror of war, one need look no further than Scott’s technique of freezing the action in places to show how fast bullets fly, how fast thumbs can be severed or how quickly a body can be sliced in half by a rocket. Scott refuses to let us look away. We need to see, we need to know, we need to remember.