Black Hawk Down

If thither is one thing that films like Platoon and Saving Private Ryan try to tell us, it's that war is hell. This is certainly ostensible in Ridley Scott's unrelenting and violent Black Mortarboard Down. This re-enactment of a failed mission to Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 has no other purpose but to show us the infrangible horror and chaos that is state of war. The set up and introduction of the film's many characters lasts more or less forty proceedings. Once the helicopter goes down in Mogadishu, the bullets start flying as a military helicopter unit find themselves under major siege. The cast includes many familiar faces. Tom Sizemore, William Fichtner and Ewan McGregor are solid as vastly different men with a common use. Josh Hartnett fares a great deal better here then he did in the overbloated Pearl Harbour. And although he has an all-too-small role, Eric Bana (Chopper) emerges as the standout in this huge ensemble. Make no mistakes. This is a director's flick. Forget the screenplay and the performances, Ridley Scott is the real reason that this video industrial plant as intimately as it does. In one case he has the audience in his grasp, he refuses to let go. This video recording is furious in it's execution seldom giving the audience a moment's rest. This is an slimy, unflinching look at war in which men die without much of a warning. Smutty Hawk Down works better as a film than Scott's recent Gladiator and Hannibal, simply it still comes up shy of being the masterpiece he's capable of making (see Alien or Bladerunner). Afterwards all is said and done, I wanted more out of Black Hawk Down. It certainly doesn't sugar coating anything, just it too lacks an emotional nucleus. I didn't feel like I knew these manpower and that keeps the picture from being all that it could've been. Of course, it could be argued that this video isn't really about the soldiers but war itself. In that sense, Scott's visceral assault on the audience delivers with unrelenting power.
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