5. Black Hawk Down
Some dismiss and deride BHD as jingoistic nonsense, pointing (unjustly) to a pervasive “isn’t America awesome?” vibe which is actually far from the overall effect of the film. Yes, the US were outnumbered in Mogadishu, yes many of them fought valiantly against problematic odds, but many of their problems were of their own making – arrogance, presumption, under-preparedness – take body armour, night-vision goggles, plenty of water. Why not? The hard-hitting battle sequences, all close-ups, shaky cameras and viscera, continue to impact, even if Saving Private Ryan, We Were Soldiers and their ilk have made this sort of thing a little over-familiar. We do feel like we have been dropped into a battle zone and if some of the characterisation is unusually thin for a Scott film, at least the film itself is immersive and gripping. There is perhaps something thematically appropriate about it being difficult at times to tell who is who and what is going on – the bedlam of battle reducing the struggle to simple survival and maybe, just maybe, watching the back of the man next to you.
Scott seems to have cast pretty much everyone in BHD – William Fichtner, Sam Shepard, Ewan McGregor, Ewan Bremner, Eric Bana, Tom Sizemore, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom, Josh Hartnett, Jason Isaacs, Jeremy Piven, Ioan Gruffudd – and they all get their moments, even if some of the UK cast struggle more than others with the US accents required of them. At times, this can feel like a Tony Scott film rather than a Ridley Scott one, with an abundance of aerial overheads and cuts between surveillance shots and regular cameras, but that is no sort of criticism – this is simply a bit of a stylistic departure for Ridley Scott, with more emphasis on visuals and physical impact than actor/character work. In the end you are left with the sense that the assorted US special forces units were very, very fortunate not to suffer much greater losses than they did. Gripping work from Scott.
