I just caught it on cable (ION). And the director did an amazing job-it looked just like Somalia! Anyway, a few other questions:
-was there a crowd of Somalis actually cheering the GIs on, as they ran to the football stadium?
-the spy who fingered Aideed (the taxi driver with the taped cross on his car roof)-was that true? Anybody displaying a cross would have been shot in Mogadishu
-the death of the soldier 9who died because the medic lost hold of an artery-was that true?
Great movie-probably the best anti-war film ever made. I wonder how army recruitment went after this film came out?
According to DVD extra I once watched, it was mostly shot in Morocco.
If you can get your hands on the DVD, there’s a commentary track with a lot of the actual guys who are being portrayed in the movie. They talk a lot about what the movie got right and wrong. I don’t recall exactly what they said about the scenes you mention, although I dimly recall the cheering crowds being pointed out as accurate.
If I have the time, I’ll pop the disc in later tonight and check it out.
Yup; the IMDB entry for the movie concurs.
I had a chance to talk with Mark Bowden, the author of the book, a few years back, when he was writing for The Atlantic, and visited the ad agency where I worked. Fascinating guy; we wound up mostly talking about the Iranian hostage crisis (as he had just written “Guests of the Ayatollah”).
I’m trying to remember from the book. First off, it wasn’t specifically a Cross, as in a christian religious symbol. It was merely two lines of tape that intersected. So yeah, a “cross” as in “two crossed lines”, not a “cross” as in a crucifix. Nobody was getting shot for trying to hold his car together with duck tape.
There was some compilation of characters and events that occurred. IIRC there was a guy who was shot and bled out while they were unable to get rescue to the hold point. I don’t recall if specifically the femoral artery got torn while they were trying to patch him up.
The thing is, in terms of military match up, it was a hugely one-sided battle with the Americans greatly ahead in terms of casualty numbers. And it was a success from terms of accomplishing military objective - they took the stronghold, they took prisoners, they gathered lots of intel. But it was an absolute cluster-fuck from the standpoint of operations and management, and thereby PR. The technique of taking out choppers by aiming Rocket Launchers at their tails is a challenge to overcome, especially in a tight urban environment like that. That they lost two choppers to strikes should not be a surprise. But losing one team and having a soldier taken hostage was a giant black eye.
Meanwhile, the slipup of one crew falling out of the chopper was a problem, but the biggest problem was navigating the roadways. In the movie, there are lots of cross streets and it looks odd that they can’t find where they want to go, but according to the book, that part of Mogodishu is a network of streets and alleys that don’t follow a clear plan, and the locals and blocked and choked points with debris and vehicles, that made driving through impossible. So they were looking for their routes that were not well-marked and they couldn’t see where they wanted to go with a clear path to get there. And that had them circling their routes, and thus getting sliced to ribbons by the automatic weaponry.
The fatal femoral artery wound was real. It was much more graphic in the book. The medic did a heroic job of trying to save the soldier but, in the end, could not. I highly recommend the book.
Slightly off topic but also check out “The Outpost” by Jake Tapper. I predict this will become a movie, too. Two Medal of Honor winners in one battle in the mountains of Afghanistan. How some military commanders think is beyond me.
Great success? hardly-we lost two $30 million helicopters and 19 lives. We didn’t catch Aideed (the spies we employed were double agents who reported to Aideed). We also had the spectacle of dead Americans bodie’s being dragged through the streets. We walked into a trap, and were damn lucky that we could borrow the APCs from the Malaysians and Pakistanis to extricate our men.
The sad irony was that the same men who fought that day later had to escort Aideed to a meeting of the clan elders, after which we pulled out of Somalia.
That idiot general who planned this disaster at least resigned-how come he never had a “Plan B”?
Yes, this is true. He gets shot in the femoral artery, and despite strenuous efforts the medic can’t clamp it shut and so he bleeds to death.
I read the book before seeing the film, long before I saw the film. I feel the need to point this out because (a) it’s true and (b) it makes me seem smarter than I am. I was going through a period of reading military books at the time, because mass death and carnage and exciting real-life mayhem excites me, and I vaguely remembered the real-life event. The incident above sticks in the mind. The book is exciting, sickening, well-written, just slightly dated. There is a nineties-ness to it.
In contrast the film is just awful. Like everything else that Ridley Scott has directed it has a cold blank hole instead of an emotional core. He is a great craftsman, I’ll give him that, with a commercial eye, but his movies come across as documentary training films on how to create themselves rather than entities in their own right. As a translation of the book or real events it was filtered through Ridley Scott and Hollywood into something that had the form of the book, the same title, a skin that resembled the book wrapped around a hollow wire framework packed with fireworks and candy.
The book presents the battle as a terrible waste of human life. The soldiers who fought and died in it were wasted. Verb, to waste. It was a stupid pointless waste conducted by top professionals whose effort was thrown away for nothing. Even if it had gone without a hitch it would have achieved nothing, or perhaps the tiniest shuffling of pawns in an enormous chessboard. And this would have been apparent at the time, not just in hindsight. The book has a palpable sense of things falling apart and degenerating into chaos. It is about a group of professionals doing their best in the midst of a disaster not of their making. The film is a straightforward action adventure with a chief baddie who is killed in a fancy way and a heroic ending.
As an anti-war film it doesn’t work at all. It’s a battle action film, an exciting spectacle. War is a continuation of politics and for an anti-war film to work it would have to be about politics; the fighting is a consequence of the politics. But no-one would go to see such a film. No-one went to see In the Loop. It changed nothing. The only practical effect of Black Hawk Down was to spur sales of AR-15s in the US and furthermore it helped cement Ridley Scott as a bankable director again after several fallow years (Gladiator might have been a fluke, after all).
Your lives are being thrown away by people who would be happy for you to die so that they can live in splendour. The kind of people who manage you at work, except that they have the power to order other people to round you up and put you in prison. They do it so that they can attend meetings and feel important. They despise you for being weak, and in their eyes for being stupid; they get a sexual kick out of giving orders. Strand them on a desert island and they would starve. They are beached whales, flopping around on the sand, begging for food; and when you move to feed them, they produce a knife and threaten to slit your throat unless you feed them again and again. Big fat sucking mouths.
I’ve kept quiet, but Ridley Scott was just an emotionless craftsman, who is valued by empty people who see the pretty pictures and mistake them for art. A hundred years hence people will remember the look of Blade Runner, but they will know nothing and care nothing about the man, because he had nothing to say, he said nothing, he stood for nothing. His films likewise. This is the truth, the objective truth. He was not great. The tragedy is that indifference will prove me right; no-one will care about him. When things leave the popular consciousness they simply fade and are forgotten, and the people who recognised them for the empty charlatans they were are forgotten too, because no-one cares any more. The tragedy of history - beyond the fact that we do not pay attention to it - is that we cannot learn from the things we forget.
“the director did an amazing job”
The fact that you don’t seem to know who directed it worries me. I’m sure you would have written “Ridley Scott did an amazing job” if you had known. How is it possible that you don’t know this? You’re eleven years older than when you joined Straight Dope. You’re not a kid any more, unless you joined when you were five. You have over 16,000 posts. But looking through them I see a blank void of simple questions and one-line responses, which depresses me, because by any measure you’re far more successful at Straight Dope than I am.
I get the same thing from the IMDB. You look at their profile and they’ve been posting trolling messages about Star Trek: Insurrection or whatever for thirteen years. I’ve been on the internet since the mid-1990s, back when it felt fresh and new… okay, I’ve been on the world wide web etc, yes I know the internet is much older than the 1990s, let’s get that out of the way - and we’ve all reached a point where people have been doing this for a substantial chunk of their life. You realise that it’s not just a phase, or a pose, it’s what they are. It’s their single trick. And that was them, that was all they were.
This goes far off-topic, and it’s also very much a personal criticism of ralph124c. That’s not appropriate for Cafe Society. It belongs in The BBQ Pit.
I never read the book, only saw the movie, and I completely disagree with your conclusions about the movie. I most definitely saw the movie as showing how the events were a disaster of things falling apart, for no worthwhile goal. I saw it as definitely being anti-war, while being pro-soldier - it shows a bunch of men who did the best they could in the craptastic situation they were forced into.
I also suspect the you’re not clearly remembering the events of the movie when you make the statement that “The film is a straightforward action adventure with a chief baddie who is killed in a fancy way and a heroic ending.”. Aideed is the only “chief baddie” and he is not killed in the movie, in a fancy way or any other way. The movie’s postscript mentions that he was later killed in a battle with a rival gang. And there really isnt a heroic ending, other than saying that they fought, withdrew, and eventually left the area when political decisions changed. If anything, the ending underscores the futility of their being there in the first place.
I’m not saying it was a perfect movie or the it was completely accurate, but your vitriol seems ridiculous and over-the-top. For example
[quoteYour lives are being thrown away by people who would be happy for you to die so that they can live in splendour. The kind of people who manage you at work, except that they have the power to order other people to round you up and put you in prison. They do it so that they can attend meetings and feel important. They despise you for being weak, and in their eyes for being stupid; they get a sexual kick out of giving orders. Strand them on a desert island and they would starve. They are beached whales, flopping around on the sand, begging for food; and when you move to feed them, they produce a knife and threaten to slit your throat unless you feed them again and again. Big fat sucking mouths.[/quote]
?! The first three or four sentences here are making a good point. But I’m still unsure exactly who you’re referring to - the leaders there (e.g. MG Garrison)? leaders higher up in the military? Politicians in general? The president at the time (Clinton)?
I’m always amused when people claim that their personal opinions about a creative work are “the objective truth”. The just asserting that your opinion is the truth doesn’t make it so.
This seems like an illogical argument on its face. There’s plenty of times the I’ve watched a movie when I didn’t know who the director was, but I still thought they did a good job. I don’t see how knowing/remembering the director’s name is necessary to comment on the quality of their work.
Would you make the same argument about any other person involved in the film? Can you praise or criticize a supporting actor without knowing thir name? Can you enjoy the cinematography without any clue who the cinematographer was?
I see that the special addition DVD has commentary which includes COL Lee Van Arsdale. Van Arsdale was the Delta ground commander and led the relief column. He was also the technical advisor to the film. I met him once in Iraq. A very impressive guy.
I read the book after seeing the film, and came away thinking the filmmakers (director Ridley Scott being just one of them) did an excellent job of translating the essence of the book onto the screen.
Excellent post, Ashley Pomeroy. With an analytic intelligence rarely seen here.
Sorry Ashley Pomery, I couldn’t disagree with you more.
I’m not going to address it point by point, but in short I had read the book before seeing the movie, and loved the book, it was a riveting and fascinating read. Saw the movie, loved it too. I personally believe the movie was a very good translation of the book.
I take a lot of issue with your comment that the movie missed the ‘descent into chaos’ aspect. I thought the movie captured that admirably. The scene cutting between the command helo and Garrison in the command centre, when everything goes quiet, and those words are relayed out “we’ve got a Blackhawk down”. The commanders just hopelessly look between screens and for me anyway, could just feel the loss of control and the ‘things just went to shit’ helplessness.
Just one other thing - what do you mean by the ‘big-baddy’? Who gets what coming to him? I don’t recall any character like that in the movie?
A question for the OP. You wrote “it looked just like Somalia”. Have you ever actually been to Somalia? It’s not exactly a popular tourist spot. If you haven’t been there, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “it looked just like I imagine Somalia looks like” - in which case, welcome to the world of movies. That’s what good filmmakers do - they make things look real to their audience. Ridley Scott, for example, has made things like ancient Rome, future Los Angeles, and a space freighter all look realistic.
Why would you say anyone with a cross would be shot? Durant, the blackhawk pilot captured, used a bible as a journal while captured.
What’s funny about the anti-war claim is that the movie made me want to be a Ranger. I never became one (I hate push ups), but I did fly in a Pavehawk for a couple of deployments.
Hooch mentioned the futility at the end. He mentioned that they don’t fight for politics or goals, but for the people next to them.
I have not (rare for me) seen the book, but I only saw the movie last year and I have to say that the overwhelming feeling of the film is “what a fucking waste”. I don’t see how you could come away with any other impression and am surprised by the opposite reaction.
It’s funny, I’d never list Ridley Scott on a top ten of my favorite directors, but he ends up directing some movies I really love. I think perhaps that he isn’t a Tarantino or somebody - every time he makes a movie it’s a different movie.
Minor hijack: I only kind of liked the movie. But, YT has a really fantastic video, “The Real (or True? ed. note) Story of Blackhawk Down”. Not a lot of difference from the movie, except I thought it was at least 50 times better.
BTW, back to the OP: Did anybody cheer the GIs on their run back?
While Ashley’s commentary goes pretty far over the top, there’s a kernal of truth to it. Scott is a very affectless director. He doesn’t really have a distinctive style or flare that mark out a movie as being one of his, aside from a general tendency to keep his characters at arms distance. We get the surfaces of the characters, and are left guessing at what, if anything, is under that surface. I don’t think this is a flaw, necessarily, although I do think it’s a limitation. There are some movies where this approach absolutely works, and serves to elevate the material. Blade Runner is the best example of this, but I think it works for him in Alien and Black Hawk Down. I think it worked against him in Gladiator, whose story of betrayal, vengeance, and ineffable loss needs a director who’s willing to get up to his elbows in his character’s guts, and Scott doesn’t seem to have that in him.
There’s one character we see a few times during the battle, a Somalian in a black head scarf who’s usually riding in a jeep with a machine gun mounted on it. He appears to be a lieutenant of some sort, and is directing other Somalians in attacking the Americans who are pinned down in the city. He’s killed when some Rangers sneak up behind a different truck (this one with a rocket launcher) and turn it on him. He does a double take right before he’s blown up in slow motion. It’s the most overtly Hollywood moment in the film, and a bit of a misstep tonally. I think it would have worked better if they’d just garrotted him directly, and then walked into the building that was sheltering the rest of the Americans.
Anyway, he’s not some much a “big bad” as a way to put a face on the mob. He’s there to signal that this isn’t just a bunch of crazy people who are just out to murder some white folk, but that it’s a concerted (although disorganized) military action by Aidid against the UN peacekeeping force.
ETA: He’s also the one who opens fire on the people tying to get food from the aid truck in the opening scene.