Ridley Does Mogadishu
By Michael Sean McGowan
In "Black Hawk Down," Ridley Scott captures a sometimes wincing
sight of the costs of the New American War. (movie review)
The irony of the so-called “Battle of Mogadishu,” a supposed
hour-long operation to capture two minions of a Somali warlord in 1993 that
dragged into nearly a day and cost the lives of 19 American soldiers, is that,
by all military accounts, the operation was a success. Certainly not a perfect
mission, but its objective was accomplished, losses were kept to a minimum, and
it played by the age-old litmus test of war: we killed more of “them” then they
did of us.
However, as both the book and the film Black Hawk Down
illustrate, attrition is becoming less and less of a factor in determining the
success or failure of American engagements. Consider the irony of those who can
remember the slaughter of Vietnam to live in a time and very different war today
in Afghanistan where the death of one marine (the only enemy-fire casualty at
the time of this writing) becomes the stuff of banner headlines and MSNBC
special reports. In his book, Mark Bowden makes an elliptical argument stating
that the results of the October, 1993 debacle, the pull out of American forces
from Somalia, confirms not American weakness but an elevated value of (at least
American) human life. Conflictingly, he also argues that the pull out
compromised American interests and was a weak-kneed gesture.
Some people there is just no pleasing.
By not only translating Bowden’s novel to film, but also
making it an ultra-graphic blow-by-blow account of what happened in the Bakara
Marketplace on October 3, 1993, director Ridley Scott poses an interesting
riddle. He makes us wince at the carnage for an “obscure” objective, the waste
of American lives on a peacekeeping mission in a time where the phrase
“peacekeeping” has been used with increasing venom, but also seems to say, “this
is what war has always been like. There has never been a clean war, no pretty
war. Take it or leave it.”
Black Hawk Down differs from most accounts of war on the
screen in that it takes a wholly detached view in an arena thought to be ripe
with emotional catharsis. Unlike a spectacle like Saving Private Ryan which
populated its heroes with archetypes of every cultural and Hollywood sort, Black
Hawk has the obligatory opening in which we are served mini-vignettes to
introduce us to the cast of players, but once the shooting starts, all identity
is lost in a mess of swirling dust and machine gun fire. The only “character”
(you don’t know how unusual it is to use that word when talking about real
people) that stands out is the idealistic sore thumb of Sergeant Eversmann (Josh
Hartnett) whose codas on heroism and we’re-here-to-make-a-difference-ism feel
purely West Coast.
Within minutes of the completion of the mission, bad luck
strikes in the form an RPG downing a Black Hawk assault helicopter. The
logistics of the film argue that once soldiers had to be peeled away to protect
the crash site, more Gambler’s Ruin was destined to follow. Pockets of soldiers
were stranded, abandoned. An escape convoy, redirected through sniper fire and
roadblocks by slow eyes in the air, becomes lost.
And another Black Hawk goes down.
The remainder of the film boils down to one huge, massively
filmed battle scene, even more impressive than the opening of Saving Private
Ryan for its geographical breadth and duty of maintaining a coherent chess game
of individuals moving to and fro and back again under withering gunfire. For the
most part, it has a hypnotic (and slightly numbing) effect. Ridley Scott eschews
the gloss that made Hannibal and paints the film on a canvas in which the only
bright colors seem drained of their luster. It is not an easy thing to look at
but Scott keeps the details rich and avoids a video game-style outplay by
showing us, for example, the thorny issues that arise from simply trying cross a
street with a man who has been deafened by friendly fire.
By its end, Black Hawk Down wears a little thin when the
bravado and flag-waving rear tiny heads, obvious meddling on the part of
uberproducer Jerry Bruckheimer. The movie does make a few glaring omissions or
missteps:
• Despite have a named cast (Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore)
that becomes usefully lost in the fray, there is the determination to make
Eversmann a central character throughout the film, despite the fact that
Eversmann was one of the first soldiers evacuated from the battle ground.
• The 1,000+ Somali death toll included countless civilians
who were gunned down by accident or panic. While Bowden never condemns or
apologizes for this tragedy (in fact, reading the book, it is difficult to see
how it could be avoided), this is a detail left out of the film. This is not
necessarily an unwise move, though, since I suspect that strained audience
tolerances would have been snapped by such a sight.
• In its perfunctory docu-camera style, the Somali point of
view is left out. Many Mogadishu citizens were enraged about losses their
families had incurred either as targets or innocent bystanders of the conflict.
Added that many were also successfully brain washed by the warlords to believe
that the purpose of the U.N. forces was to convert them to Christianity.
Black Hawk Down was released three months early to meet the
deadline for this year’s Oscars. Don’t count on Best Picture honors- as good as
Black Hawk Down it never buries the needle on emotional or artistic accounts
enough to receive that honor. Its expedited release also comes on the heels of a
new-found appreciation of American military might, which poses an interesting
quandary. As the title cards at the end of the film remind us, the Battle of
Mogadishu was a conflict we lost in terms of being able to stomach the sacrifice
of American lives for a global purpose. Whether you like the movie or not, it
does give you something to wonder, and perhaps shudder about, the next time you
open a newspaper. A-