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Anatomy of war
Sgt. Eversmann (Josh Hartnett) surveying options.
Black Hawk Down (ENGLISH)
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor
Dir: Ridley Scott
FIRST THINGS first - Black Hawk Down definitely, totally and completely deserved its Academy Awards for editing and sound. Director Ridley Scott who "shoots like he would edit," has managed to tell a coherent tale of the chaos and mayhem of a 20-hour street battle in Mogadishu, Somalia when a covert US operation goes horribly wrong and US forces are surrounded by thousands of armed militia.
Yes, it is absolutely brilliant, the tight rein that Scott has kept over the proceedings. The taut pace with absolutely no let up is mind-boggling. The editing was so reminiscent of Oliver Stone's JFK which also used an incident (President Kennedy's assassination) as the pivot and built a tale around it with competent cuts between the different strands that make the story.
Here too you have these different stories - the General watching the action through an aerial spotter and infra red sensors, a man hurt when he misses the rope, a pilot taken prisoner, a nervous sergeant leading his first mission, the ground troops, the wounded, the dead, the militia and the civilians - and these stories are seamlessly merged to tell this compact tale.
The sound compliments the action - the ack-ack of the guns, the whirring of the Black Hawks (helicopters) and especially effective was the use of silence. The cinematography (Slawomir Idziak) is perfect with the washed out browns giving way to a forlorn night. Set design is equally impressive accurately recreating a city under siege - the blackened burnt out poster of the Somalian tourism board serving as a poignant reminder of a country having seen better days.
The film though technically of the highest order is disappointingly weak in content. When you have finished being over awed by the technical mastery of the film and you begin to wonder at the purpose of the film - you come up with zip, zero, zilch. With the blood, guts and gore - it certainly cannot classify as entertainment. Nor is it an anti-war film and in the final count you do not even know if the lieutenants that the US rangers went in to capture were captured at all.
This is not a meditative masterpiece on the futility of war a la Terence Malik's Thin Red Line, it is not even sentiment served Spielberg style of Saving Private Ryan, nor does it sport the senselessness of Behind Enemy Lines (thank god for little mercies!).
Scott has a single point agenda of recreating the events of October 3, `93 and he does with visual virtuosity that he is renowned for. Based on a book by Mark Bowden, the film, like the book, does not examine the context of the situation -- it is concerned with documenting the events. So it finally plays out like a CNN or Discovery Channel documentary with super high production values - cannot expect anything else from producer Jerry Bruckheimer now, can we?
The cast -- what we can make of them behind the sweat and the fatigues has Josh Hartnett playing a convincing Eversmann leading his first mission and the talented Ewan McGregor as the desk jockey whose talents on the field are matched by his talents behind the desk. Sam Shepard plays Garrison as the tough general who directs operations behind his shades. And incidentally, all the Somalian warlords look like rap stars with their bandannas and shades. Dialogue is minimal, whole sentences in a sea of staccato orders and screams are few and far between.
At the end of the film, you are told that 18 Americans died on that October day and 1,000 Somalis. The 18 Americans have been immortalised in print and now on film but there is the little voice asking what about the Somalis? The film does not want to go into those spaces and ask those uncomfortable questions and ends being a technically superb but essentially hollow piece.
MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER
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