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Black Hawk Down

Black Hawk Down

By Max Lalanne • September 12th, 2013
Static Mass Rating: 4/5
BLACK HAWK DOWN (MOVIE)
Columbia Pictures

Original release: January 18th, 2002
Running time: 144 minutes

Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: Ken Nolan, Mark Bowden
Composer: Hans Zimmer

Cast: Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, William Fichtner, Sam Shepard

Black Hawk Down

The city of Mogadishu, in famine stricken Somalia. It’s 1995 and a joint task force of Army Rangers, Delta Force, and the 160th SOAR, here to support UN peacekeeping operations against the militia of Mohammed Farrah Aidid, organize a quick strike raid into the city to capture some of the local warlord’s top lieutenants. It deteriorates into a full-blown rescue mission as, per the title, a Black Hawk military helicopter – the best of the best available – is shot down in the middle of the hostile urban city. Leaving no man behind, the troops on the ground fight to reach any possible survivors just as another chopper gets hit by a rocket propelled grenade.

A viable argument could be made for Ridley Scott’s 2001 film being a technically superb, or furthermore perfect, movie. Intensely visual and visceral but aurally important as well, this down-and-dirty war picture about the disastrous Battle of Mogadishu sends us straight into – pardon the tired expression – the middle of the action. For more than two hours, the dull, metal staccato of automatic rifle and machine gun fire ring out in unpredictable yet expected bursts, explosions reduce desolate buildings to rubble littered with corpses, and the whirring sound of helicopter blades from above becomes a reassuring, even lifesaving one.

It would be like one of those video games if not for Scott’s filmmaking aesthetic and style, which is damn hard to discern between his various films of various genres, but here he allows for surprising moments of visual beauty to cut through the grime and blood, and even accentuate it.

Black Hawk Down

Those moments are far and few between, but they make an impression: a convoy of menacing, bristling Black Hawk and AH6J Little Bird military choppers flying in formation low over a pristine glittering beach, while the sound fades away stylistically to create a haunting and formidable atmosphere. Apocalypse Now (1979) is brought to mind, naturally, but instead of going for a gung-ho showiness of strength, a sort of calm before the storm is shown. Then, it’s over – the choppers bank sharply left and start flying over Mogadishu, flying straight into the black smoke billowing in the air from the tires that the Somalian militia are burning as signals.

Another strikingly poetic bit comes near the end, where a dozen or so exhausted American soldiers are forced to run pell-mell down the road out of the hostile slums of the city and into UN Safe Zone territory, being watched retreat by hundreds of victorious armed militia behind them. They stumble in slow motion through some sort of claustrophobic fog, led by laughing street kids and cheered on by peaceable villagers.

What does all this add up to substantially, you might ask? Is Black Hawk Down an antiwar movie or simply pro-war? I don’t really know. Does Scott know? I don’t think he cares. Perhaps the best insight one might get about what this film aspires to Black Hawk Downbe are the quiet conversations between the young Sgt. Eversmann and the lean, dangerous SFC “Hoot” Gibson, played by Josh Hartnett and Eric Bana, respectively, two soldiers with very different train of thoughts when their minds inevitably turns to some quasi-existential self-reflection.

There’s a point in the film where Eversmann, who’s already shown to be a wide-eyed idealist, nervously asks the older man what he thinks about being here fighting “skinnies” in a faraway African country. “Y’know what I think? Don’t really matter what I think. Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics and all that shit just goes right out the window,” is the terse answer.

So Black Hawk Down doesn’t want to be about anything but the men, because in the end the story’s about them not the American government’s involvement in Somalia or the failed operation or other tempting things like that. That’s more than fine by me, as the film is so mind-blowingly immersive and nail-bitingly realistic that we truly feel like we’re are there alongside the soldiers, and that nothing else really matters.

Black Hawk Down

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Max Lalanne

Max Lalanne

Max Lalanne is an award-winning student filmmaker - whose debut short won a prestigious award at the Houston Intl. Film Festival when he was just 13. The bi-lingual film blogger and critic also has his own movie website, SmellofPopcorn.com.

He loves almost all kinds of cinema and watches a diverse array of movies on a regular basis, some of his favourites include Dr. Strangelove, Fight Club, Lord of the Rings, Aliens, and Finding Nemo. You can follow Max on Twitter @maxlalanne.

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