Black Hawk Down Lifts up the Soldier

By Teddy Durgin
tedfilm@aol.com

For any guy who has ever wondered why women love men in uniform, go see Black Hawk Down The film is an exploration in courage, survival, and loyalty among those who serve their nation in the military. This Ridley Scott-directed motion picture, which I named one of the 10 Best of 2001, is perhaps the most sustained and intense depiction of ground warfare ever pulled off in modern cinema.

Black Hawk Down chronicles the ill-fated 1993 mission in which U.S. special forces were ordered to abduct two lieutenants of Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the vicious Somali warlord, as part of a larger effort to quash Somalia's civil war and bring order to an African nation ravaged by fighting and famine.

What at first was a carefully planned mission using Black Hawk helicopters and a convoy of armored military vehicles soon became fraught with unforeseen danger and miscalculation. The daylight raid was only supposed to take an hour, so night-vision goggles and other supplies were never packed. Soon after the mission began, a soldier (played by Orlando Bloom of Lord of the Rings) took a terrible misstep, forcing the rest of the squad to alter their game plan on the fly.

On screen, it doesn't seem like that big an error at the time. But, in reality, it set a whole terrible chain of events into motion. One of the Black Hawks was shot down over the city of Mogadishu, crashing into a remote town square. When that happens on screen, what seems like every man, woman, and child in the city takes up arms and descends on the crashed chopper.

Hell followed for the men stranded on the ground.

Remember the opening of Saving Private Ryan? The Normandy D-Day invasion sequence? The intensity of the images? The gnawing fear on the soldiers' faces? That sequence lasted all of 20 minutes in the movie. Black Hawk Down is like being in a firefight for more than two hours! The enemy is closing in on all sides, your ammo is running low, and you have only a bunch of well-trained, well-armed, well-scared kids to guide you back to safety.

Black Hawk Down is one of those "How-in-the-Hell-did-they-do-THAT?" movies. No one has questioned the enormity and magnificence of its technical achievement. What criticism there has been in the mainstream media has had to do with the fact that you don't really get to know any of the soldiers on the mission. This is certainly true. But you know what? It didn't bother me. Not in the least. That's because the mission IS the film! Scott lets the audience see how the mission is planned out, how the soldiers prepare for the mission, how the mission first goes right, then how the mission goes terribly wrong. The soldiers, much as they are in real life, are just pawns in a larger game. And they accept that. That IS the job.

Ridley Scott is at his best depicting the chaos that follows, as small pockets of Rangers and Delta Force commandos become separated from each other in different parts of downtown Mogadishu. Most impressive is how we, the viewers, are able to follow the different storylines of peril from the remaining Black Hawks hoverng in the sky overhead and from the command base on the outskirts of town. Then, there's that horrible moment where a second Black Hawk is shot down, and things start to really get

Well, I'll let you experience those moments for yourself.

It helps to have some recognizable faces to navigate us through the ordeal. Much of the film is seen through the eyes of Staff Sgt. Matt Eversmann, played by Josh Hartnett of Pearl Harbor fame. Ewan McGregor knocks yet another role out of the park with his portrayal of Ranger Spec. Grimes, a glorified desk jockey pressed into service when another soldier gets injured before the mission begins. And Sam Shepard is appropriately commanding as Major Gen. William F. Garrison, forced to watch via remote as his men suffer defeat after defeat.

It also helps the tension when actors we aren't terribly familiar with get into jams. Ewen Bremner and Thomas Hardy play two Army Rangers who get separated from the rest of the unit at the beginning of the mission and have to fight their way alone across the city to be reunited with their comrades. Johnny Strong and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, meanwhile, play two Delta snipers who volunteer to protect the survivors of the second crashed chopper as an angry mob closes in. And Aussie actor Eric Bana, who will be seen as the Incredible Hulk/Bruce Banner on the big screen in 2003, is just a freaking stud as Sgt. First Class "Hoot" Gibson. He's the career soldier, the Delta Force commander you WANT to come get your ass out of Hell! The guy you risk turning on your walkie-talkie and asking for even though the enemy might hear you just a few steps away in the dark.

Oct. 3, 1993. I'm ashamed to say I was unfamiliar with the events of that day. I don't even remember Dan Rather or Peter Jennings' grim-faced newscasts, relating these events. I was probably off seeing a movie or waiting for the next weekend's football games.

Is the film a textbook account of the U.S.-Somalian situation? No. Will you come away from the film any smarter than you were going in? Probably not. Did I have any problems with the movie? Yes. I have one nitpick. I found it really distracting that the filmmakers opted to make all of the American military personnel in the movie white, except for one token black Ranger. Was that the way it really was, or did Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer want to subconsciously differentiate bad guy (armed African militia) from good guy (uniformed Caucasian soldiers)? If that's the way it really was, fine. But movies take liberties and change history all the time to suit the stories being told. I would have preferred more diversity in the film. Look at the footage of the U.S. military carrying out the war effort in Afghanistan right now. It's a very diverse fighting force.

But, like I said, this is just a nitpick. I'm really not that politically correct. It was just something that struck me while I was watching the film and took me out of the action every so often. Most of the time, my eyes were glued to the screen. At its heart, Black Hawk Down is a testament to the dangers men and women in the military face even during virtual peacetime. You can't watch it without thinking about what's going on in the world today. The times we live in give the film its emotional kick.

See it on the big screen if you're going to see it at all.

Black Hawk Down is rated R for language and intense, realistic,
and graphic war violence.

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ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE: In my last review, I lamented the fact that Black Hawk Down only has one African-American soldier among its featured cast. At least two dozen readers wrote to tell me that the non-fiction book on which the film is based states that of the 140 or so Rangers assigned to the mission, only two were black. Thanks, everyone. You guys are better than Ask Jeeves! Now, can someone tell me what Harrison Ford is doing with Minnie Driver?!