Henry's Top 100: #26 - Black Hawk Down

Ben steps in for this edition of the Top 100...he likes this movie a lot



Most war movies suck.

Not only that, most of the war movies you're supposed to like suck.

Platoon? Sucks.
Full Metal Jacket? Sucks.
Saving Private Ryan? Sucks.
The Deer Hunter? Not really a war movie and it sucks.
Apocalypse Now? Sucks like an industrial vacuum.

Looking at a list of war movies, I guess I should be more clear: Movies about Vietnam-era war and beyond suck, plus most war movies made during that same time frame, the 60's and beyond, are also bad (although there are more exceptions in the latter case).
Enter Black Hawk Down.

Based on the book of the same name, Black Hawk Down depicts the Battle of Mogadishu; an attempted raid during the U.N. peacekeeping mission to Somalia that turned in to a pitched battle when two Black Hawk helicopters were downed during the course of the mission (hence the name) necessitating an extended military effort to 'leave no man behind'. I overflow with compliments for this movie. More than simply not sucking, it goes on the very short list of my 'perfect' movies: not necessarily my favorites, but the movies where I would not change any major decision made by the film's creative team, from directing and writing down to costuming. Across the board, Black Hawk Down feels like a tight, lean movie.

The cast is a host of 'that guys' and recognizable stars: Josh Hartnett, Tom Sizemore, Sam Shepard, Jeremy Piven, Orlando Bloom (rocking an outrageously bad southern accent), William Fichtner, Ewan McGregor...I could go on. The cast is reliably solid throughout with no one awful enough to take you out of it (Bloom comes close), although I will single out Eric Bana and Jason Isaacs as the two positive standout performances. Both have small roles but, in this movie, everyone has a pretty small role; it's just not a performance-driven movie. More than almost any other movie I can think of, this is a triumph of direction. Ridley Scott was hoping to give an encompassing and realistic portrait of the events without excessive jingoism or false cinematic flare. Yes, there's plenty of bullets, courage and explosions but it's war, it kind of goes with the territory. The result of Scott's work is a movie that feels surgical: there's no dissection of whether being in Somalia was a good thing, there's no attempt to expose incompetence on an operational level, there's no even much of an effort to glorify the whole affair. Scott wanted to, from a soldier's perspective, show what happened and give the audience a visceral sense of how it felt. Scott doesn't even make much of an effort to have the movie explore the emotional experience of combat and the end result is that this movie serves as a setpiece demonstration of how modern war is fought. I think this is a positive thing; showing something important without too much attempt to color the audience's judgment on the subject can lead to breathtaking cinema. Black Hawk Down does this beautifully with its single-minded focus on the core question: from a soldier's experience, what happened?

In fact, one of my few desired tweaks of the movie is that it would give me more detail as to the logistical decisions made during the conflict (how were troops dispersed, etc). While this would have fascinated me, it would have distracted from the focus of the movie and turned off many audience members besides. But even with a more muddled picture of the operation, it's the process of modern war that makes this movie truly special. Movies give us a pretty clear sense of how WWII and wars prior to it were fought, but the present day is largely mystifying to us which is a big part of why I submit that Black Hawk Down is so great. Exceptionally well-made, it's a rare war movie about war itself more than 'people involved in war' and, as I've said, has no peer in depicting war during or after Vietnam. On most days Black Hawk Down is my favorite war movie and it's unquestionably one of the very best ever made.


Henry's favorite scene: Eric Bana leads the rescue team