BLACKHAWK DOWN Review

Chaotic, loud, violent, gory & tense.

That is BLACKHAWK DOWN.

BLACKHAWK DOWN at its best is a bristlingly intense nightmarish deathtrap. The situation around which BLACKHAWK DOWN is based was one of the absolute most intense in modern American military history. It was a basic mission that turned into the dreaded last stand sort of situation, that sounded like hell. Those that survived it described their experience as being Hell on Earth. A true clusterfuck of a situation that history duly recorded with honor.

This film marks the first time that Jerry Bruckheimer has teamed up with Ridley Scott. An interesting pairing to be sure. Bruckheimer has been known for years to make rah rah flag-waving overt rub it in your face patriotism. Almost Amerisploitationy. He has worked with Ridley’s glossier brother Tony Scott many times in the past. Whereas Ridley Scott has made a career as an Auteur with an amazing eye for visuals, and when paired up with great material… He’s made great films. Jerry has never made a great film, though he often makes wonderfully fun popcorn flicks. BLACKHAWK DOWN even reminded me a tad of an early Bruckheimer producing effort called MARCH OR DIE, which I am really quite fond of. Like this film, it was a hopeless situation too, though handled with a tad of camp, which thankfully was missing here.

What would this pairing come up with?

I wasn’t a fan of the script, but was well aware that the draft I read was not the finished draft and that Ridley Scott could sure make up for the screenwriter’s lack of vision in bringing the situations off the page and to life on screen.

When the film first went into production, I was flooded with emails from men that lived through the incidents that the film was going to be based upon and they were terrified of it being Hollywoodized. And Bruckheimer’s involvement and the subsequent release of PEARL HARBOR did not instill a great deal of hope in these fellas.

But there was Ridley Scott.

The early reviews talked about how the film was all blood and guts and explosions and bullets and noise and noise and noise. Most of what I was hearing coming out of the film was that Eric Bana was very very cool in the film, but nearly everybody else was left unmentioned.

Since this was an early 10am screening, I decided to wake up extra early to put on a warm up flick. Waking up cold and stumbling into a war film with no preparation… Well it isn’t a very good idea. So I decided to put on the DVD that Father Geek picked up the other day for HAMBURGER HILL. Another clusterfuck of military hell, where too many die, bravely slipping and sliding down the nastiest hill in the history of film. Littered with shell casings, guts, blood, mud and tears. Father Geek stumbled bleary eyed into my room as the final assault on HAMBURGER HILL began and we wondered why they didn’t just drop a 10,000 lb bomb on the top of the fucking hill and save a great many American lives in the meanwhile.

War is something that backseat drivers always question. "Why didn’t they do this?" "Why didn’t they do that?" We have the benefit of peaceful couches and time to think casually about the situations, without the pressure of our lives being on the line. Makes it convenient. I find it disturbingly easy to just drop really big bombs on bunkers, rather than sending a few hundred men up a hill with fortified enemy positions and established supply lines for them. Now days, that’s how the American Military does it. They bomb the hell out of a place, dropping huge big bombs, then send in ground troops for clean up. Of course Special Forces are always on the ground, fingering the targets, ensuring their military value.

Anyway, promptly as my warm up flick ended, Father Geek and I headed out for the Arbor here in town for the main course of cinematic breakfast this bright Tuesday morning.

Upon arriving, a good friend comes up to the car asking if I’m prepared to be bored. Hmmm… He must’ve heard something different from me. I heard that the movie was fairly non-stop action, and the inclusion of it on a good many top ten lists, including both of the TIME MAGAZINE lists yesterday had my hopes up.

There’s a difference between the book and the film. The book is compelling, tragic and captivating. The film is taut, loud and thrilling.

In the book, you get to know the men in the situations, you clearly get a sense for what they were doing there, what the forces they were fighting were about. In the film, you know they just want to get the hell out of dodge and that they don’t want to leave any man behind.

The first 45 minutes of the film were grossly mishandled in my opinion. Being familiar with the situation does help, but if you know nothing about what happened in Somalia, or if you haven’t read the book, there is very little in terms of clarifying why the United States was there, why the mission these guys were on was important, who these men were, why the mission was undermanned and caught so off guard initially and even how the events on screen are actually related to what is happening today in Afghanistan.

The film doesn’t attempt to focus on any of the men on this mission in this opening act. It is just a bunch of faces, expecting a cake walk of a mission. Just the reader’s digest version of the situation… No, not even that, more like the CLASSIC’S ILLUSTRATED version. However, if you know what is coming, there is a sense of dread in this first act, but only if you are familiar with what is coming.

This crucial set-up is not spent either clarifying the objectives or endearing or building the characters of the men about to walk through the shadow of death. Instead of focusing on a particular group and bringing us up to speed through their eyes, we are just thrown Helter Skelter into the omnipotent point of view, but without any clear focus.

They actually spend the most time developing Sam Shepard’s Major General William Garrison and a Somali Arms Dealer, who is there to apparently be creepy and scary and to warn the General that this isn’t his war. We never build his character, but we occasionally flashback to him and his dastardly evil cigar smoking of Communist Cuban Cigars! Honestly, this character and this little side plot did not help the film or the characters that were moving forward.

Now all this might seem that I’m headed towards writing a negative review of this film, but I’m not. This is my quibble. The crutch that kept the film from truly excelling to become one of the ‘great’ war films, instead it becomes a really good ‘action’ war film.

The second the mission gets underway, Ridley Scott’s keen sense of action direction and the unveiling of the various plagues of problems which assaults the one hundred elite U.S. soldiers. Well, it becomes a nail-biter of a flick. The action and the tension in these situations is enough to make a Sumo’s sack suck up. Tense as hell.

The first sign of just how far this movie was going to go is when you see that first Somali explode in a hail of viscera and flame when that missile thingy hit him. That was the first, "OHMYGOD!" It was followed for the next hour or two by a whole series of "OHSHITS," "OHFUCKOHFUCK," and the always reliable, "JEZUSCRIST!!!"

Nothing in the trailers prepares you for the hell this movie unleashes. At this point, the film becomes a non-stop continual BAD SITUATION that is always accelerating to an even WORSE SITUATION.

Through this ever escalating taut atmosphere of doom, you can’t help but become attached to these nameless characters. I know only the most trivial bit of knowledge about any of them. I know that Ewan McGregor makes a good cup of coffee. I know that Josh Hartnett just wants to do a good job. I know Tom Sizemore likes to smile out one side of his mouth. I know that Jeremy Piven has no sense of humor. I know that Eric Bana has more on the ball than anyone else going into this mission. I know that Orlando Bloom wants to kick ass, but his Pvt Blackburn is developed about as much as Jack Black’s character in Tim Burton’s MARS ATTACKS.

The characters are not treated as stereotypes, they just are not developed much at all. They’re just young faces wanting to do the best they can, and perhaps that’s the best way to handle a film with so many characters in so many terrible situations. To dig into one character and not another is to perhaps trivialize the names and faces that you don’t pay attention to. By making each of them equally undeveloped, they prove themselves to the audience through their actions and not through dialogue and melodrama.

The film is a thrilling and chilling and scary as hell, but it really misses the boat in establishing the story, situation and characters that we should be dealing with in those opening 45 minutes.

Otherwise the film is excellent. Everything you wanted from GHOSTS OF MARS and didn’t get in terms of the impossible nightmarish situation that our heroes must conquer is here in spades. It has all the claustrophobic fear that classic last stand movies need to have. I was reminded of ZULU and ZULU DAWN towards the end, but without the wonderful setups that those two films had.

How does it honor the memory of those that fought and those that died there in Somalia?

Well, while it doesn’t clearly establish any of the reasons why any of the soldiers were there or who they were or why the Somalis were so pissed at the Americans… It does show the American Special Forces as being tough as hell, heroic in the heat of battle and cool under fire. There is no Bill Paxton HUDSON here breaking down all girly like and proclaiming their situation as utterly fucked & doomed. These men dealt with their issues and did what had to be done.

This was a very good action war film. Very much in the league of HAMBURGER HILL in a great many respects, but with far better action. There is never the insight into the situation. You learn nothing about the meaning of the engagement beyond the ‘humanitarian assistance’ level. There is no real sense of the madness of war, just that it sucks and you have to deal with it.

There is certainly truth in that, but the film leaves the profound in the book upon which it was based.