Black Hawk Down. Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Ken Nolan based on the book by Mark Bowden. With Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana, William Fichtner, and Sam Shepard. A Columbia Pictures release. At the Apple Valley, Entertainment, Flagship, Hoyts Providence 16, Opera House, Pastime, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.

Most war movies question the purpose of war. Black Hawk Down questions the purpose of war movies. Should they arouse patriotic spirits and honor the sacrifice of our armed forces? Should they denounce war's inhumanity? Should they explore war's causes and cost? Or re-create the experience of combat for the vicarious enjoyment of spectators who invest no more than the price of a ticket? In these politically precarious times, Ridley Scott opts for entertainment.

Although fitfully moving, eloquent, and even poetic, Scott's adaptation of Mark Bowden's fine book about the ill-fated 1993 raid by US special-operations units in Mogadishu pretty much limits its scope to superficial thrills. Without much inthe way of context or character development (you'll find more political edge in, say, Scott's Blade Runner), the film favors visceral excitement over comprehension or context. War is hell: let's take a tour.

True, it's only a movie, but this was no ordinary military engagement, and these are not ordinary times. The botched raid in Mogadishu proved a turning point in US foreign policy, putting an end to future military intervention even during the genocides of Bosnia and Rwanda, and discouraging the pursuit of such vague threats as terrorism. Vague, that is, until the catastrophe of September 11.

In the film, though, these issues become as simple-minded as the politics of Dirty Harry. The Somalian warlords led by Mohamed Farrah Aidid -- black men in do-rags and Ray-Bans who look like rappers or South Central gangbangers -- have used famine as a means to power. Three

hundred thousand have starved to death, and so Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos under crusty Major General William Garrison (Sam Shepard) have to go in and take some of the bad guys out in a daring mission.

But the red tape and the clueless impatience of Washington hobble the good guys from doing their job -- no armor, no gunships, poor timing -- and things go wrong from the start. In an allusion perhaps to Apocalypse Now, choppers head out over the beaches and squalor of the city not to the Ride of the Valkyries but to Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child." Exhilarating, but down below a kid holds a cell phone to the sky, a militia leader hears the engines roar on the other end, and armed men and women and children by the hundreds and thousands are on the move.

Why do they hate us? The film doesn't much care. But fate doesn't seem on our side either, as the first Black Hawk chopper is downed and the planned 30-minute mission unravels into an 18-hour Sisyphean ordeal ending with 19 Americans and a thousand Somalis killed. Much of that is rendered in this film as the greatest video game ever played, with black-skinned targets bearing Kalashnikovs and RPGs popping up in front of American gunsights and getting blasted, with points taken off, no doubt, for shooting innocent civilians. As the original goals of the mission disintegrate and survival becomes paramount, the reptile brain of flight and fight take over, for the filmmakers as well as for the embattled soldiers.

Under these chaotic conditions, the cooler heads of the character actors prevail, such latter-day William Bendixes as Tom Sizemore in the role of Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight, who mutters to himself in a blood-spattered Humvee as his convoy's simple mission of "extraction" deteriorates. His bullet-riddled vehicles chug through a gantlet of roadblocks, militia fire, and misdirection from command as he tries to rescue downed pilots sent to rescue troops and the troops sent out to rescue them. It's a vicious circle that underscores the film's central contradiction: though Black Hawk Down celebrates the Ranger credo to "leave no one behind," it also illustrates how when put into practice that tactic usually results in more left behind.

America's subsequent solution, until recently, was no longer to put anyone there in the first place, a position questioned by the film's "idealist," Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann (Josh Hartnett), who maintains that "we can either help or watch the country destroy itself on CNN." But as hardnosed Delta Force sergeant "Hoot" Hooten (Eric Bana) points out, once the shooting starts, all thought of politics goes out the window.

That's the case, at least, in this movie (Hooten is one of the film's few fictitious characters). Without any developed characters or ideas to add depth and meaning to its voyeuristic violence, it comes dangerously close to pornography. What saves it, perhaps, is an overriding tone of melancholy, a sense of tragic human frailty, from the opening epigraph, Plato's "Only the dead have seen the end of war," to the playing of Thomas Moore's "The Minstrel Boy" over the end credits. When a medic gropes in a gaping wound to retrieve a retracted artery, or when a fallen soldier murmurs about his wife and a cut reveals that a grenade has blasted him into a shredded, gut-oozing torso, war begins to seem like hell again.

Issue Date: January 18 - 24, 2002