-- 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. *