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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Sunday, February 3, 2002
19:26 - Black Hawk... eugh.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/Movies/12/28/hol.review.blackhawk.down/

(top) link
Damn, isn't that game over yet? I got home after 2.5 hours in the theater, and there's still no end in sight to the shrieks of AAaaAAAOOOUUWWWWWWWWHHH! in the living room whenever large men with inch-thick skulls collide in midair.

I was pretty sure Black Hawk Down was a fairly awful movie between the time that I got home from the theater and the time that I pulled up Paul Tatara's review (linked above), but I had to go check out his opinion of it just to make sure. And, well, it looks like it wasn't just me. This thing really was a dog.

There is nothing original or interesting in Black Hawk Down that wasn't already in Saving Private Ryan or Three Kings. You have the former's brutally graphic violence, albeit 2.5 hours of it this time instead of just the intro-- right down to the surreal scenes where the audio fades away while some soldier picks up a severed hand or arm and puts it in his pocket for later. You've got the latter's weird, yellow, grainy, overexposed film quality, making it look as though the whole film canister is made out of desert. And yet, somehow, it makes both those things look cliché, though they've only each happened once before, like the scenes with that odd bluish tint like the Gladiator dream sequences that show up here for some reason.

But that's not where the triteness ends, no sir. It manages to shoehorn in all kinds of cheap war movie clichés that we've all seen a hundred times elsewhere-- and they're not even handled in an interesting or original way here. There's a scene with the obligatory exchange between a dying soldier ("Tell my parents I fought well today...") and his comrades ("No, you're gonna tell them yourself"), ending with the soldier dying-- whoah, surprise. There's a scene in which a soldier gets captured and interrogated by one of the Somali militia-- a guy who, by his artfully accented, flowery vocabulary appears to have been schooled at a Boston boarding school, and who regales the prisoner with his unique local perspective on the nature of the war and humanity and death, worthy of a star Times columnist-- though he seems a lot less dangerous to be held captive by than the Iraqi guy from the exact same scene in Three Kings. And the movie finishes up with equally trite, contrived, rehearsed speeches on heroism and how "it's all about the man standing next to you" delivered by grunts with Southern accents-- almost embarrassing, considering the meaningless slaughter you've just sat through, and the (surely unintentional, but ironic nonetheless) presentation of all the soldiers as pretty much indistinguishable. Their hair is all cut the same (well, duh, it's the military), but they all pretty much do the same stuff, with the exception of the guy deafened by machine gun fire (who seems to have gone, to coin a phrase, "deaf and m-mmm-m-mm-mmad, suh!", waddling from cover to cover and making oblivious gape-mouthed eye-rolling facial expressions that seem as though they'd be more appropriate in Hot Shots, Part Deux). I've never seen such a movie full of anonymous, only vaguely individual characters before-- the dialogue that isn't spoken in brusque walkie-talkie-ese can be gathered together onto a single page of script.

For all its triteness, Black Hawk Down does get a guy thinking about war and stuff. But what it does, in this day and age, is to remind us just how good we have it. "19 Army Rangers and 1000 Somalis lost their lives in the raid," the movie tells us at the end. Wow, you'd almost get the impression that we treat the enemy as anonymously and dispensably as the movie treats them. We get shot after shot of Somalis getting blown away-- but it's tempered by (a) the interrogator accusing the American prisoner of leading a meaningless life, secure in his money and his comfort... and (b) the contextual sense that one gets while watching the movie, that our rallying cry of "Leave no man behind" is intensely fatuous and egocentric. Especially now that we've demonstrated the ability to flatten a country like Afghanistan by dumping bombs into the windows or rooms where the bad guys are meeting, while losing only the occasional Marine in on-base accidents and killing civilians only by extremely rare accident, like by typos in the targeting computers. By that token, Black Hawk Down may be the last gasp of the Bad Old Days of war where fighting for one's life in the streets of a hostile city while the enemy makes itself indistinguishable from noncombatants was the way it was done.

That's the sense I left the theater with. "Damn, war sucks-- but thank goodness we'll never find ourselves in that kind of mess again."

Yeah, I know we will. But still, I think this movie just confuses people right about now. It makes us feel like "Well, if third-world countries don't want the help of outside nations who want to prevent mass starvation and genocide, then fine-- let 'em fend for themselves." But then it turns around and makes us thankful for the modern age of warfare and Hooray For the USA, or something. I don't know. I think I've completely lost track of my train of thought. I'm sorry-- this is the second time I've gotten this far in this post; the first time I was trying to make a ® symbol and hit Command+R (reload) instead of Option+R, an error which threw the whole 10K or whatever into the bit-bucket. I think it discarded whatever point I might have had too.

Bottom line: I didn't like the movie very much. (Parting note: There's a medical scene that's so cringeworthy that it could only have been dreamed up by someone who noticed that the audience would be so jaded and desensitized by the first hour of the movie that they would have to do something so graphic and visceral, no pun intended, as to take the crown away from the Reservoir Dogs torture scene as the Most-Censored-By-Blockbuster bit on the shelves. And it leads right into the "Tell my folks I fought well today" scene, telegraphed so clumsily that it could have been replaced by a silent-movie-style tinny piano music and a dialogue card reading "WAR DEATH CLICHÉ SCENE #4"... so people who rent from Blockbuster probably won't be missing much.)

But as horrific as the past two-and-a-half hours were, I still think it was better than being in the same house as the Super Bowl.

Now is it over?

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© Brian Tiemann