Good war movies excite our senses. But the great ones also arouse our humanity, awaken a sense of moral seriousness, horror and pity. Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” is a first-rate war movie that presents its subject so horrifyingly well that it doesn’t need to probe or preach.
War is hell, the movie says, and then proves the proposition with damning force. Yet hell, the film also says, can ennoble some who face it. Based on Mark Bowden’s 1999 book, “Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War,” the film is about the real-life bloody Oct. 3, 1993, street battles in Mogadishu, Somalia, between elite U.S. Army forces and Somalian militias, and it brings back this hellish event — in which 18 Americans and hundreds of Somalis died — with lavish physical detail and grisly thoroughness.
The so-called Battle of the Black Sea becomes the occasion for what is easily Scott’s best movie since 1991’s “Thelma & Louise.” This is a battle picture of grueling authenticity. Yet, because Scott visualizes it with such painterly skill, it’s also often searingly beautiful. Drenched in icy blue light, the images become — like the convulsive Goya-esque scenes of slaughter in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” — frescos of carnage and death. Helicopters crash, convoys are raked with gunfire, and soldiers covered with blood die in the rubble of a city gone mad.
The scene is nightmarish, yet there’s a gruesome feel of reality about the movie. It’s a relatively faithful version of Bowden’s chronicle — for which the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter interviewed over 100 survivors of the conflict, on both sides. Bowden supplied context as well as detail. But most of the movie’s time and energy is devoted to the fight — which began when part of a 160-man unit of Rangers and Delta Force units working for the UN Peacekeeping Force helicoptered into a dangerous section of Mogadishu near the Victoria Hotel to kidnap two lieutenants of the murderous warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. There, two Black Hawk helicopters were downed by grenades, crashing and igniting a battle that eventually consumed much of the city.
For the rest of the film, we watch those Rangers trying to shoot their way out with their captives in tow, while more Rangers, Delta Force ops, choppers and several convoys try to reach and extract them.
Battle movies have always been treasured by (mostly) male movie audiences, especially when staged by a master like Peckinpah or Kurosawa (“Seven Samurai”) because, from a safe distance, the violence of battle excites and entertains. But “Black Hawk Down” erases a lot of that distance. Anyone queasy about screen violence should be forewarned: The fighting starts about a half-hour into the 2 1/2-hour running time, and then barely lets up for a minute.
Along the way, Scott and scriptwriter Ken Nolan (with an assist from “Schindler’s List’s” Steve Zaillian) show us dozens of characters, an ensemble in which only a handful really stand out. Chief among them: Sam Shepard, lean and mean as Maj. Gen. William F. Garrison, commander of the mission; Tom Sizemore in a prototypical Sizemore role as salty, gutty Ranger convoy leader Lt. Col. Danny McKnight; and Josh Hartnett (partly redeeming himself for “Pearl Harbor”) as the sterling, male-model handsome Ranger Staff Sgt. Matt Eversman. There are powerful moments in bits from Jeremy Piven as Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Wolcott and Gabriel Casseus as Ranger Spec. Mike Kurth, one of the few black U.S. Rangers we see.
The movie’s characters all use the names of real combatants, with only four exceptions: including Ewan McGregor as Ranger Spec. Grimes, a desk soldier desperate for action; Eric Bana as swaggering Delta Sgt. First Class “Hoot” Gibson; and William Fichtner as the more judicious Delta Sgt. First Class Jeff Sanderson. (The name of McGregor’s character was changed, under military orders, when his real-life counterpart was convicted of rape. The others are composites.)
All the movie’s soldiers look somewhat the same — buff, buzz-cut, piercing-eyed jocks — and audiences who had a terrible time trying to differentiate the soldiers in Terence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” (1998) will have problems here, too. Yet in a way, it doesn’t matter: The U.S. soldiers of “Black Hawk Down” become a mass hero — and the movie’s most moving aspect is the fact that some stay in the hell of Mogadishu because, following the Ranger credo, they refuse to abandon any comrades, living or dead.
Scott is a great cinematic poet-technician, a master of images, and so is his Polish cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak (Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “eye” on “The Decalogue” and “Blue”). Together with the rest of the company, they put us into the thick of war as few movies ever have. The first 20 minutes of Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” — the pseudo-documentary re-creation of D-Day — seemed to convey with unbearable intensity what it’s really like to be under fire. But so do the whole last two hours of “Black Hawk Down.”
That’s the movie’s great achievement. It’s one of the most ferociously convincing physical re-creations of warfare ever put on screen. But it’s also too sparing of context. What we learn about Somalia, or the underlying causes, comes from a few title crawls and some cursory conversations.
It would have helped, for example, to know more clearly that a major reason for the city’s rage when the Black Hawks went down was another helicopter raid carried out by the UN, a few months before, which resulted in 54 collateral deaths. Instead, we get so quick a comment on Aidid’s corruption and brutality — stealing UN food intended for the general populace, and killing peacekeepers and their own people — that we might think the rest of the Mogadishu populace were simply gun crazy.
There’s a more troubling question: Is the movie racist, because, here as in real life, the Somalian militias were almost all black and the American forces primarily white? If you tell the story fully, you can’t avoid this — another reason we need more context. There’s barely a “why” in the film, though more titles at the end, obviously post-Sept. 11 additions, forge a link with terrorist leader Osama bin-Laden, whose group trained some Somali militias.
But I don’t think “Black Hawk Down” stokes prejudice, except perhaps among the already predisposed. The Somalis aren’t personally demonized; they’re a mob with guns in a country without a government. This is a movie about modern urban warfare: how it’s fought and what it feels like. On that level alone, it’s a staggering triumph — if a mixed one.
Sam Fuller, B-Movie master and World War II vet, said something about war films that fits “Black Hawk Down.” Every honest war movie, Fuller said, was inevitably anti-war, because if you show what really happens in combat, no sane man or woman would lightly risk it. “Black Hawk Down,” at its best, proves him right.
`Black Hawk Down’
(star)(star)(star)1/2
Directed by Ridley Scott; written by Ken Nolan, based on the book “Black Hawn Down: A Story of Modern War” by Mark Bowden; photographed by Slawomir Idziak; edited by Pietro Scalia; production designed by Arthur Marx; music by Hans Zimmer; produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Scott. A Columbia Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:24. MPAA rating: R (intense, realistic, graphic war violence, and language).
Eversmann ………….. Josh Hartnett
Grimes …………….. Ewan McGregor
McKnight …………… Tom Sizemore
Gibson …………….. Eric Bana
Sanderson ………….. William Fichtner
Garrison …………… Sam Shepard
Wolcott ……………. Jeremy Piven
Kurth ……………… Gabriel Casseus
