Black Hawk Down
Dir. Ridley Scott
Now playing at various theaters.

Time was the only real difference between filmmaking brothers Ridley and Tony Scott was that Ridley was fond of glowing wet pavement while Tony favored backlit windows with windswept curtains. Both got their start making TV commercials, and both were instrumental in the evolution of popular cinema into movie commercials. Between them, the siblings Scott have made a few good pictures--Ridley's Alien and Blade Runner, Tony's The Hunger and Crimson Tide (just play along)--and a load of sumptuous, overstyled garbage that includes Gladiator, Hannibal, G.I. Jane, Enemy of the State, Days of Thunder, The Last Boy Scout, and Beverly Hills Cop II. Somewhere along the way, however, Ridley Scott got respectable, which is why he was allowed to make Black Hawk Down, one of the most egregiously awful war movies of all time.

As a filmmaker, Ridley Scott is an ad man forever in search of a product to sell. In Thelma & Louise, that product is Female Empowerment. In Gladiator it's Heroic Vengeance. In Black Hawk Down, there are several competing products, including Military Hypocrisy, Uncommon Valor, and African Savagery, but in the end the bill of goods boils down to the hoariest chestnut of all: War Is Hell. (Thanks for clearing that up, old man.)

To test this chancy proposition, Scott enlists the true story of a botched 1993 U.S. military incursion in Mogadishu, Somalia, during which a battalion of elite forces was stranded in the "entirely hostile district" of Bakara, and forced to hold their impossible position for 15 hours without supplies or support. To underscore the message, Scott drops us right in the thick of the battle zone, where we see the soldiers get systematically butchered by marauding hordes of faceless African militia, while their comrades in arms struggle against furious resistance and bureaucratic incompetence to bust through and rescue them. Though the real story is fraught with brutal moral complexity, in Scott's hands, it's a slaughterhouse from beginning to end. Like any good shill, this director can't be bothered to let messy details like politics, reason, or history complicate his pitch.

Instead, he focuses on the men, the insurmountable odds, the panic, and the gory death. Scott creates a terrifying battle zone, but he fails to establish the men in any but the most superficial ways. If the idea was to scarcely be able to tell them apart--as it may well have been--then this failure is a costly success. The violence is shocking, but curiously weightless, because it's happening to extras. All Scott's attempts at shorthand humanity (here a love of coffee, there a show of mercy) betray his real agenda of making with the carnage.

There is little mention of Islam in Black Hawk Down. Aside from a line about the enemy being "in prayers," the subject of the Somali militia's religious and ethnic specificity--presumably Sunni Muslim--goes unstated. Doubtless, this was a conscious choice on the part of the studio, if not the filmmaker, to avoid the appearance of Muslim-bashing. But to strip the Somali fighters of their very identity, while depicting them as murderous thugs, is to render them a meaningless enemy, which in turn renders the film a sadistic exercise in exploitation, lined with sinister racial subtext. The picture of the enemy is torn right from the book of white-man terror. Step up America, you want to see Muslims hating Americans? Here they are, in all their bloody-eyed savagery, black as carbon, brandishing guns, and screaming I-YI-YI-YI-YI-YI as they come to slaughter your ass.

After the long battle is over and the survivors retreat to the safe area, many still on foot, literally running for their lives, a title informs us that 19 American soldiers lost their lives that day. Almost as an afterthought, the text kindly mentions that some 1,000 Somalis, presumably militia and civilians alike, were also killed. The fact that this massive gap in casualties is stated only in an epilogue is the most damning evidence that Scott is too busy grinding human sausage to even notice the real story he's telling.

In times of war, it's important for art to matter, not only to its audience but to its moment. Taken as a reflection of/response to reality, Black Hawk Down is about as helpful as Tony Scott's peacetime ode to the military-industrial complex, Top Gun. Though his brother shows no sign of forgetting that his films are just long-form commercials, Ridley Scott seems to want to say something important. Unfortunately, he's been polishing turds for so long he can't smell the shit on his hands.