WHEN “Black Hawk Down” went into release a few weeks ago in New York and Los Angeles, the New York Times’s Elvis Mitchell went on the attack. He claimed that it was riddled with “jingoism,” had “a simplistic gung-ho spirit,” and reeked of “glumly staged racism.” He mocked the American soldiers in the film because they “grin . . . righteously” as they try to “kidnap members of the inner circle of General Muhammad Farah Aidid.” Mitchell and a handful of other critics have attacked “Black Hawk Down” for a variety of reasons, but when you get right down to it, they have only one gripe: It doesn’t hate the military. A slender movie about a small but important event, “Black Hawk Down” is faithful to Mark Bowden’s 1999 book. Director Ridley Scott has stripped it bare of the usual Hollywood hokum and instead made a picture that depicts the events of October 3, 1993, fairly and accurately: A small team of American soldiers goes into downtown Mogadishu to apprehend two of Aidid’s top lieutenants and is attacked by thousands of heavily armed Somali men, women, and children. The soldiers are hunted through the night, and after nearly twenty-four hours of sustained combat, make their way to the safety of a U.N. compound. Eighteen Americans and more than five hundred Somalis are killed. In the cinematic sense, “Black Hawk Down” is more than pedestrian film-making, but not much more. It doesn’t stand in the same league as “Tora! Tora! Tora!” or “Saving Private Ryan.” But in a cultural sense, Black Hawk Down is an important movie, for it marks the end of Hollywood’s campaign against the armed services. Not long ago, the progressive Baby-Boomer types who started coming to power in Hollywood in the 1970s minted a seemingly endless stream of war movies that made the U.S. army look like a band of barbarians. The fashion may have started with Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 nuclear-freeze comedy Dr. Strangelove, but anti-military sentiment built up far beyond “Dr. Strangelove”‘s level during the 1970s. After the Vietnam war ended, movies began to depict not just the army’s leadership as corrupt, but the troops, as well. In “The Deer Hunter” (1978) and “Apocalypse Now” (1979), nearly every man in fatigues is a brutal, doped-up savage. BY THE TIME the 1980s rolled around, Baby Boomers were becoming directors, and they were producing deeply unflattering portraits of the military. Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” (1986) won Academy Awards for best director and best picture–for portraying a unit in Vietnam made up of homicidal maniacs and confused incompetents. Kubrick’s crack at Vietnam, “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), was equally unflattering, as was the 1989 Brian De Palma film “Casualties of War,” about a group of American soldiers who rape a Vietnamese girl. There were pro-military movies, of course, like “Rambo” (1982) and “Top Gun” (1986), but they tended to be popcorn fare. Nearly every serious film made the army look ghastly. When the Gulf war started, yellow ribbons sprang up across the country, and suddenly–all at once, really–Americans loved their armed forces again. Even people who opposed the war were careful to couch their objections in language that supported and ennobled the troops on the ground. And after the war ended, Hollywood began the slow process of coming to terms with the nation’s embrace of its warriors. Ridley Scott’s “G.I. Jane” (1997) portrayed the roughneck Navy SEALs as a decent bunch, even as they were having gender integration forced on them. “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) kicked off the celebration of the Greatest Generation, which continues today. In “Rules of Engagement” (2000), a colonel orders his men to fire on a crowd of civilians storming an American embassy in the Middle East. During his court martial, it is proven that the civilian mob was heavily armed and provoked the attack. In 2001, both “Pearl Harbor” and “Behind Enemy Lines” took sunny views of soldiers. On a few occasions Hollywood has relapsed into its natural state of military hating, notably with 1998’s “The Thin Red Line” and 1999’s “Three Kings,” but the films performed poorly at the box office. And with “Black Hawk Down,” even that small bit of dissent has packed it in. In a movie fraught with room for worrying about military conduct–the mission was dubious, the indigenous population was black, civilians were killed–“Black Hawk Down” is squarely on the side of the Americans, who are portrayed as committed, moral professionals making the best of a bad situation. It is a movie that would have been impossible to make fifteen years ago. THE ONLY people who haven’t come around are some hold-outs in the critics’ corner. In his review, Mitchell accused “Black Hawk Down” of turning “the Somalis into a pack of snarling dark-skinned beasts.” An AP wire story last week reported that at a screening of the movie in Mogadishu, “Somali men jumped up and cheered as the first American helicopter hit by Somali gunmen fell to the ground” and “cheered whenever an American was hit.” It seems that the only people left who still want to see American soldiers as the bad guys are our enemies–and our film critics. Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
