|
BLACK
HAWK DOWN
5/10
USA
2001
director
: Ridley Scott
script : Ken Nolan, Steve Zaillian (based on book by Mark Bowden)
producers include : Jerry Bruckheimer, Scott, Simon West
cinematography : Slawomir Idziak
editing : Pietro Scalia
music : Hans Zimmer
lead actors : Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Sam Shepard, Eric Bana
with : Tom Sizemore, William Fichtner, Ewan Bremner
144+ minutes
America’s
botched Mogadishu operation of 1993 is the backdrop to Black Hawk Down,
for director Scott a return to White Squall, the now-forgotten
men-n-boys-ensemble sailing-pic flop that preceded his box-office double
whammy of Gladiator and
Hannibal. He’s now
established as a versatile, jobbing director-for-hire, as comfortable
in the dusty streets of Somalia as the shadowy recesses of Florentian
galleries or the vast expanses of the Roman Empire. This time, he brings
Bowden’s bestseller to the screen with hands-off neutrality – whether
the film is pro or anti war, pro or anti the US, pro or anti the Mogadishu
op, all are left in the eye of the beholder.
It
can be read any which way: either as gung-ho, Behind
Enemy Lines style flagwaver (in which capacity it was screened
by President Bush to 20 Republican Senators) or as a pacifist Thin
Red Line tract, convincing us that War Is Hell by putting us through
it for two solid hours. Scott, of course, started out in advertising –
his most famous commercial being for the Hovis loaf. He still owns a large
production house, and he’s never quite left that world behind - throughout
Black Hawk Down, you feel like you’re being sold something, and
whatever it is, you suspect it probably isn’t as good for you as brown
bread.
Leaving
aside the guiding ideology (or lack of) on show, however, it’s appropriate
that the film’s pivotal event is the downing of a pair of Black Hawk helicopters.
Because Scott also ends up defeated by the cumbersome vastness of his
hardware as, like commanding officer Garrison (Shepard), he gradually
loses control of his intricately planned exercise. What should be a developing
story bogs down into a succession of noisy scenes, and Scott seems so
distracted planning his next but of pyrotechnics that the actors end up
left to their own devices. This results in some plain bad performances
– Orlando Bloom is worst of the lot as a greenhorned grunt, though McGregor’s
ropey American accent places him not far behind. In the nominal lead,
Hartnett growls out his lines in a grim monotone, allowing Bana to steal
the show as a seen-it-all, too-cool-for-school, mountain-bike-riding Action
Man, somehow retaining his hardass dignity (not to mention his straight
face) as he spits out some of the script’s corniest frontline homilies.
Very
few of the others make much impression, though it’s clearly part of the
film’s point that we can’t tell them apart or make any emotional connection
with them. Everything, of course, can be defended as ‘part of the point’
– the dehumanisation, the chaos, the numbness, the tedium. And whatever
criticisms you try to level at the film can probably be traced back to
Bowden’s book, such as the unambiguously shameful way each of the 18 US
fatalities are identified by name in the end titles, while at the same
time we’re quoted the rough figure of 1,000 Somali dead. Every time an
American dies in Black Hawk Down, it’s an event – but the ‘skinnies’
are mown down by the dozen. Yes, ‘Skinnies’ is how undernourished Somalians
are referred to throughout the film – but, of course, that isn’t the film
speaking. It’s the book. It’s the soldiers. So that makes it all right.
29th
January, 2002
(seen
Jan-14-02, Warner Village, Newcastle)
by Neil
Young
-
|
