Soldiers On The Screen

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Good question, though not one that's comfortably answered by a brutal film that requires us to embrace the same deadly chaos our soldiers encountered eight years ago--a battle without visible turning points, a battle no one could map, a battle in which the hero is the group whose members become so grime smeared and blood spattered that audiences will have trouble identifying the players.

There are powerful incidents--a downed chopper pilot captured by a raging mob, the bloody struggle to save the life of a soldier whose artery has been severed. There's even a presumptive hero, Josh Hartnett's Sergeant Matt Eversmann, leading a Ranger "chalk" (small unit) into combat for the first time. He's a guy who thinks maybe they can eventually "make a difference" in Somalia. But his unit catches much of the movie's hard luck, and by its end he sadly realizes what every soldier finally learns--that the only principle anyone fights for is existential: your own survival and that of your buddies.

That does not mean, however, that the troops in Mogadishu fought badly. On the contrary, they took everything the enemy threw at them, improvising their own deadly responses on the run. Under fire, they were, indeed, all that they could be. Afterward, Garrison pointed out that they carried out their mission successfully (he got his "personalities") and killed at least 300 of the enemy. It merely took more time and American blood than they ever imagined it would. In other words, you can see Black Hawk Down as antiwar if you're so inclined, but you cannot possibly see it as antisoldier. It is precisely that ambiguity that makes this picture such a compelling experience.

But that still raises the big question: Will people go to see it in numbers large enough to repay its estimated $90 million cost? It was, of course, shot and largely edited before Sept. 11. The only changes made since then, both Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer insist, were to ensure its action and geography are understandable to audiences.

Still, there is less distance between the event Black Hawk Down recounts and the events that most of the other great war movies relate. You have to wonder if the movie's immediacy, its obvious analogies to Afghanistan, will frighten audiences away. This is a matter of some moment to Bruckheimer. His soft-spoken intelligence belies his fame as producer of big-scale action films (Top Gun, Armageddon). At 56, he has reached an age at which he wants to move beyond popcorn movies, and he observes that in Black Hawk Down he and Scott were trying very soberly to make an entire 2 1/2-hr. movie in the spirit of Saving Private Ryan's unforgettably horrific D-day sequence--and without its "good war" rationale. No such glory attaches to Somalia. The country is today, as Bruckheimer notes, "exactly as we left it," still starving, still sunk in hopeless anarchy. Worse were the implications that the world's only superpower was unwilling to fight in defense of hard-to-explain principles. Osama bin Laden has specifically cited our Somalian retreat as an inspiration for his depredations.

But Black Hawk Down begins with a quotation from T.S. Eliot: "All our ignorance brings us closer to death." By the light of its flash-bang grenades, this movie seeks to banish some of that darkness. It offers a paradigm of what war in the 21st century is going to be--modernism run amuck as it defends itself against primitivism, innocence savagely fragmented in incomprehensible combat. Black Hawk Down makes that point without preachment, in precise and pitiless imagery. And for that reason alone it takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.