The folly of war

>> Ridley Scott discusses his controversial war epic Black Hawk Down

by MATTHEW HAYS

After the phenomenal successes of both Gladiator and Hannibal, filmmaker Ridley Scott returns with the epic war movie Black Hawk Down this week. While it has garnered much critical praise (Roger Ebert and The New York Times have cited it as one of their 10 best films of 2001), the film is also raising controversy for its lopsided vision of the suffering that occurred in a ’93 incident in Somalia. Based on journalist Mark Bowden’s book of the same name, the film portrays the hell the American soldiers went through after two of their helicopters were shot down by rebels, during a UN-sponsored mission to arrest two rebel lieutenants.

The film feels much like Saving Private Ryan’s opening 20 minutes, though dragged out to more than two hours. Basically, Black Hawk Down is one extended, horrific, no-holds-barred battle scene. Limbs get blown off. People get bludgeoned to death. Lots of civilians die. We’ve seen this sort of extreme fighting before on film, but Scott has definitely upped the ante here.

And with its rather apolitical battle setting (it was a mission launched on humanitarian grounds, not economic), Scott might have thought he would sidestep some thorny questions dogging representations of war. But detractors are already arguing the film spends too much time focusing on the terror faced by U.S. soldiers and not enough time examining the plight of the Somalis generally. The Mirror caught up with Scott by phone in New York, where he was pausing to talk about Black Hawk Down.

Mirror: You certainly capture the beauty of helicopters with this film. Something I really notice with films like Apocalypse Now and even the beginning of Short Cuts, there’s something about the helicopter that’s so cinematic and photogenic.

Ridley Scott: It wasn’t something I thought about a lot, but yes. You see it, you’re up there, you know, photographer’s eye, you say “I like this angle.” It does have a beauty to it though, a sort of aggressive beauty. The Black Hawk is beautiful. You know what the scary thing about it is? There’s a beauty in anything that is purely functional. That’s why guns are beautiful. I don’t possess a gun, but when you handle a gun, it’s fascinating. There’s a beauty there, like a piece of sculpture.

M: When I watched this film, I felt it was antithetical to your 1979 film Alien. In that film, you worked as a minimalist, showing us very little of the creature, just scaring us out of our wits through our own imagination. In this film, however, you seem to show everything, from severed limbs to people sticking their hands into the guts of other people. Were you pulling out all the stops for this film?

RS: No, the reason I was attracted to this film is because the book is a really interesting document of warfare. It happened to be Somalia, but it could have been any time. It could have been the Russian Front, it could have been Tet, it could have been Beirut. If war’s a folly—and of course it’s a folly—but as long as we have bad behaviour we’re going to have armies, as long as we have armies, we’re going to have war. I think it’s a celebration of that: it’s an anti-war film, but it also has great respect for what the military do. So it’s anti-war and pro-militia.

M: I tend to think of many of your films as having a subversive edge, especially Alien and Thelma & Louise. Were you worried Black Hawk Down might appear too jingoistic?

RS: No. I’m a military brat, you know, I don’t think I’m necessarily pro military. But I think with conditions the way they are today, I think if it’s called for, we need to intervene. If we witness bad behaviour where others can’t protect themselves we need to intervene just on humanitarian grounds. On the other hand, I didn’t want to flag wave. I’m not American, I’m English. But I’ve noticed, it tends to be you guys who go in first. And part of that is that it’s always taken on your shoulders, because you’re the most successful country on earth, with the strongest armed force on earth. So it behooves you to do something about it. So when the foreign press start to criticize this, I say well wait a minute, I didn’t see the Spanish going in there, I didn’t see the Italians going in, I did see the Brits going in second. Then they say well there’s got to be another way. And I say what? You’re going to let thousands die? What, send in nuns? Save the Children? That’s proven ineffective in terms of extreme and bad behaviour. You need, unfortunately, guns.

The facts of war

M: Well, I’m probably one of those nasty foreign press, because I’m Canadian, not American.

RS: It’s a fact of life. If you leave things alone and wait, you can be talking about a difference of thousands of lives.

M: This kind of a tribute to the American military will certainly be appreciated right now. There’s a lot of warm feeling among American audiences for people in uniform after Sept. 11.

RS: Yes, I can see that.

M: At the end of the film, you list the names of 19 military people who died. But you also state that a thousand Somalis had died, with no list of their names. A cynic might argue that this ties into a larger problem in the media: that there’s great focus on the loss of American life, but non-American life doesn’t really matter as much. It’s one of the problems we face today, as there’s so much focus on the lives lost on Sept. 11. As horrific as it was, there’s been a simultaneous active suppression of reporting on the civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

RS: Problem is, we didn’t know the names of the Somalis. We had a force going in on entirely humanitarian grounds, so it’s hardly a racist view. Because you’ve got a whole bunch of guys going in to help a black community. Someone said there weren’t any blacks represented in the film, but that’s because there weren’t any in that force. All I could do was stick to the facts. :

Black Hawk Down opens Friday, Jan. 18