| BLACK HAWK DOWN |
 2001 – USA
Director: Ridley Scott - Reviewed by Linda
FOR GOD'S SAKE, RIDLEY! A video game does not a movie make! What is the world coming to? Black Hawk Down is the ultimate joystick war-game come to life. There are just as many explosions, bullets, and generically handsome, square-jawed heroes as you could expect in the latest downloadable ultra-violent shoot-em-up game. I half expected one of the soldiers to go into a building and find a clearly marked white box with a red cross on it and grab it excitedly so that the audience could see his health instantly regenerate. Oh, and be sure to grab the extra clip of ammunition, too. OK, let me back up a second. Black Hawk Down throws us into the chaos of 24-hours of a military maneuver gone very wrong. Through what seem like pages of introduction, many words flash across the screen at the beginning of the film, giving us a quick history lessons of the who (American Marines, Somali warlords, and UN troops), the when (1993, in the midst of tyranny and famine), and the where of it (Mogadishu, Somalia). Then the film starts practically with the US soldiers racing out of their hangars to go kick some Somali-warlord ass in a very dangerous few blocks of downtown Mogadishu. One of the US Black Hawk helicopters goes down right in the middle of a city street, then all hell breaks loose as their comrades try to rescue them, getting trapped and slaughtered in the meantime. The film is ultra-violent, graphic, and disturbing, with battle and gunfight scenes that have drawn comparisons to Saving Private Ryan. But, kids, there is a HUGE difference between Ryan and Black Hawk: As cheesy as a director as Spielberg can be, he does actually make you care about his characters. In Black Hawk Down, the soldiers are literally interchangeable, a few being distinguishable only by weird "quirks" that are shoved down the audience's throats (Ewan McGregor likes coffee! Ewen Bremner is the one that's gone deaf! Ioan Gruffudd likes Steve Martin's The Jerk! Oh, never mind... Ioan just had a seizure... I guess he's being sent home.). One scene in Black Hawk Down made me shudder with horror though: The sight of a dead American soldier stripped of his clothes, his dead body carried away by an angry mob, eerily mirroring a visage of Christ's body taken from the cross. This struck me as horrific because this was the image that finally sparked for me a memory of the real incident. And it also made me realize how much the movie WASN'T conveying. Who were the real men who died? Who were these angry Somali people? What really happened? And why were we there? Tack on a good two-hour introduction, and add a two-hour conclusion, and Black Hawk Down might have been a cohesive and interesting film of a military disaster. But instead it just made me wish for an excellent documentary on the same subject, one that could give the story the honor that those soldiers' deaths deserve. (Read Kerri's review of Black Hawk Down. Let's just say, she disagrees with Linda.) |
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Believe
me, I offered to let my one of Moviepie's other fine reviewers tackle this one
(I might add, reviewers that liked Black Hawk Down a lot more than me),
but alas, there were no takers—so you, fine reader, get to hear my pissing
and moaning instead.
