Review of Black Hawk Down (2001) by M. K — 13 Oct 2011

The nadir of Ridley Scott's career. It's Call of Duty: The Movie, essentially a punishingly endless version of one of those wretched "The Military is Awesome, YEAH!!!" propaganda reels you're forced to watch during the ads at the multiplex.

This is one of the ugliest films ever made--post-produced and over-processed into a kind of visually stylized oblivion. The rest is just a mind-numbing barrage of ape men "oorah"-s, atrocious scripting ("It's what you do right now that makes a difference."--BARF), a bunch of Brits playing Americans with the least convincing accents ever, and so much gunfire the soundtrack eventually just ends up sounding like a million angry woodpeckers, all set to hackmeister Hans Zimmer's horrid McMusic.

What's even more depressing is Scott's complete and utter apolitical stance--with a war film, you must either comment on the soldiers' actions and the war itself, or risk making a propaganda film--why bother depicting war at all, if you only want to exploit some morally repugnant thrills from it, like all these disgusting war video games do? If no political or philosophical position is staked out, the film automatically defaults to a right wing mentality, because the military is itself a right wing institution. Kubrick's astonishingly cynical Full Metal Jacket is still the only blockbuster war movie ever made that gets this, and is a nihilistic round of punishment for those who enjoy war and buy into society's false hero mythology built around it. Black Hawk Down buys into those myths hook, line and sinker, and the most depressing thing about is that the increasingly money-minded Scott doesn't actually care, he just knows that's what his audience wants, and with sickening fealty he delivers.