Ridley Scott revisited: Black Hawk Down | A muscular broadside at imperialism

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Our look back at the work of Ridley Scott arrives in 2001, with Black Hawk Down – a film he wasn’t originally supposed to make.

Machinery plays a significant part in Black Hawk Down, as Ridley Scott channels his interest in warfare and the constructs of delivering it into this true-life story. But he almost ended up at the turn of the 21st century directing a very different exploration of technology – a Terminator movie.

Jonathan Mostow ended up making what became Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines in 2003 (for me a perennially underrated outing). Yet Ridley Scott came close, with Paramount seeking him to reboot Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role after a decade, once James Cameron lost interest in directing a third film. How tantalising this might have been. Scott’s lens on the Skynet devastated future and the kinetic action sequences set in our present could have been something special.

Scott instead opted for Black Hawk Down after Simon West, director of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and before it the action flick Con Air, passed on the project due to sheer exhaustion. That was following producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s attempts to bring him aboard for the adaptation of Mark Bowden’s celebrated 1999 book, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War.

It was West who had encouraged Bruckheimer to get the rights for what he believed would be a thrilling dramatisation, and he later regretted ceding ground to Scott, much as we undoubtedly ended up with a better film as a result.

Scott told Deadline more about the approach by Bruckheimer: “I’ve known Jerry since he was producing for commercials and I used to make commercials for him. So my old friend says come on, do this, because the equation is impossibly complex. So when I climbed in, I realised, yeah, this is tricky because it’s constant, instant, same-time action that occurs in many places within a small space. So it’s like a fucking videogame. It’s a videogame and yet it’s also the most marvellous example of the craziness of war. It’s a pocket-sized edition of the madness of war.”

Entering the most prolific phase of his career, Scott was firing on all cylinders in bringing Bowden’s sprawling account of a brutal conflict in Somalia during which the titular helicopter goes down in Mogadishu. This leads to a rescue mission in a hostile environment to bring a group of American soldiers home.

The script went through a number of writers, including Bowden himself. Characters were changed or excised completely. The picture had to, undoubtedly, be condensed even to fit a two-hour plus running time.

Yet it was filmed in the looming shadow of a geopolitical event that would have a seismic impact on American cinema: 9/11. The World Trade Center attack altered the context of a film that was already exploring, as Scott had earlier in G. I. Jane (to far lesser effect) the fallibilities and flawed moralities of the United States military machine.

Black Hawk Down, set in 1993, during the period between the end of the Cold War and the advent of the War on Terror, positions the US as the unipolar defenders of embattled regimes across the world. Mind you, Scott is at pains to show the limits of American imperialism in a story where innocent soldiers die and the message is inherently clear: stay out of wars that have nothing to do with you.

Scott added, recalling his first film The Duellists as an example of his interest in the mechanics of conflict across his career: “I do think the stupidity of war still stays the same. No one’s a winner. I always remember that at the end of it, even the victor is going to find that there’s some fallout. Ironically, I was checking through stuff the other day for technical reasons. I came across The Duellists on Netflix and I was absolutely stunned to see that it was exquisitely graded. So, while I rarely look up my old stuff, I stopped to give it 10 minutes. Bugger me, I was there for two hours. I was really f—–g pleased with what it was and how the engine still worked within the equation and that engine was the insanity and stupidity of war. War between two men, in that case, who fight on thought they both eventually can’t remember the reason why.”

For Scott, Black Hawk Down was a change of pace and style after the elegant and darkly horrific Hannibal, or the epic and rousing Gladiator before it.

Black Hawk Down, as a contemporary war story, seeks to evoke the grime and brutality of modern conflict, as Scott described to the DGA: “All of it had to be handheld, all of it had to be dusty, all of it had to be in the streets. I’m right in there amongst it all with the engines and the machines. You’ve got to smell the dirt and smell the shit, and the dust. I believe that things that fly through the air are all elements that are part and parcel of the visual side of the film. Even when I would create images in commercials, I would say, ‘God that room’s boring,’ so we’d start using a little bit of smoke. Or, if I’m outside, I’ll say, ‘I want a bit of dust coming out of the propellers.’ I really learned that from other directors, particularly Kurosawa in Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood. John Ford was a master of the universe in landscape and elements and dust and sunshine. And that’s before the actors get there, right?”

Speaking of actors, what a cast Black Hawk Down has, particularly with the benefit of hindsight. Look at the many performers who went on to have glittering careers beyond it. Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana, William Fichtner, Sam Shepard, Hugh Dancy, Ewen Bremner, Ioan Gruffudd, Jason Isaacs, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom – the list goes on. It’s highly weighted toward men, and unfortunately excises any sense of a Somalian perspective despite being set in that country, yet these are gender and race choices that mark Black Hawk Down as a product of the time. Many of the above actors are terrific, however, even in small roles as part of a sprawling ensemble.

What it suggests about Ridley Scott is a continued evolution as the filmmaker of muscular spectacle that he will become. Gladiator saw a shift into a far grander style of storytelling than he had previously provided, and though he will continue taking sidebars into intriguing areas – be it the Grand Guignol of Hannibal or the maudlin comedy of Matchstick Men – Scott with a film like Black Hawk Down cements himself as a vivid filmmaker capable of multitudes.

He doesn’t often foray into the modern political arena, but he’s always a filmmaker who builds his stories on polemic, with Black Hawk Down a potent example of it.

It isn’t his best. It isn’t my favourite. But it certainly works to help Scott rubber stamp his trade on the 2000s, part of a collection of films that launch him back toward the A-list of Hollywood directors.

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