Is Black Hawk Down The Best Pure War Movie of All Time?
Black Hawk Down. Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.
2001’s Black Hawk Down, a retelling of the botched 1993 raid by US special forces in Somalia, capped a sort of informal trilogy of Ridley Scott films dealing with war and violence spanning from 1997’s G.I. Jane to 2000’s Gladiator. Like Gladiator, Black Hawk Down won several Oscars and had a decent run at the box office, though not quite as successful. Also like Gladiator, Black Hawk Down is a technical masterwork. It’s immersive, gritty and as a piece of filmmaking is just brilliant.
I don’t know that it has a whole lot to say about war or violence or US foreign policy. Like Sam Mendes’ 1917, it uses cutting edge cinematic tools and techniques to suck the viewer into the horrors of war, making the the claustrophobia, the confusion, the blood and the anguish feel real. As a pure war movie and exercise in immersive story-telling, I think Black Hawk Down is second to none. It is probably the best of the spate of war-themed epics that came out during the 1990s and 2000s.
The trend can be traced back to Saving Private Ryan, when Steven Spielberg in characteristic fashion wowed audiences with the Omaha Beach sequence, using modern cinema techniques to recreate that beach head in an ultra-sensory tactile way that had never been done before on film. Saving Private Ryan dueled with a more meditative and less penetrable war epic that same year, The Thin Red Line. Neither of them won Best Picture, in one of the Great Academy Misfires of the 20th Century. But these films made it clear that the war genre movie was entering a new stage of its evolution, and Black Hawk Down was their natural successor.
Black Hawk Down, featuring an enormous and sprawling cast of famous and future-famous actors, plays almost like cinema verite. The viewer doesn’t feel like they are detached from the action, watching it at a remove the way you would in a more classically filmed and constructed war movie. You feel immersed in it, close to the action. And yet the entire sequence of events, confused and hectic and violent as they are, have a continuity and a legibility to them. Black Hawk Down doesn’t slow down for forced character moments like in Saving Private Ryan. It never really slows down. It just keeps pushing from wire to wire.
That means it also never slows down to reflect on things like what US special forces were doing in Somalia, the nature of war or violence, the Somali side of the story or anything particularly deep or provocative to the mind. Black Hawk Down won only two Oscars and they were both in technical categories, which reflects the fact that this film was a sensory cinematic experience first and foremost, expertly executed, but which didn’t aspire to ask or answer any moral or philosophical questions.
And I don’t have any problem with that at all. In Black Hawk Down Ridley Scott set out to apply his singular vision and talents to recreate a historical event in a way that would make it feel real, compelling and immersive. As a pure war movie I find it hard to rank one higher.
