Behind Enemy Black Hawks - Compare and contrast
This weekend I rented both Black Hawk Down by Ridley Scott and Behind Enemy Lines which should have been produced by Jerry Bruckheimer even if it wasn’t.
Both films deal with American involvement in foreign civil wars and in both, American troops end up fighting their way to safety from hostile territory.
There the similarities end. Scott’s movie is a high-minded treatment of war, Moores is a low brow actioner. And much against my better judgement, I confess I preferred Behind Enemy Lines.
There is little wrong with Scott’s film. The direction is taut, the performances are good and after a slow first half hour it rattles along at a fair pace. It displays all the viscera of war with relish and does not sentimentalise the events it depicts.
By contrast, Behind Enemy Lines is brash and simplistic. Americans = good, foreigners (even the ones who are supposed to be on our side) = bad. It uses similar camera trickery to Enemy of the State (by Ridley’s oft dismissed relative) to the extent where I could have sworn that one shot of a satellite swivelling to focus on a new target was reused footage from the earlier film.
However, Behind Enemy Lines succeeds where Black Hawk Down does not because it centres itself in the plights and decisions of individuals. Black Hawk Down may be a stunningly accurate portrayal of a real event in Somalia, but so what? It plays like a modern US version of Zulu as a band of heroic white Americans fight their way through a horde of mindlessly violent blacks. None of the protagonists have motivation beyond being soldiers and wanting to survive. Whilst that may be the stuff of war, it is not the stuff of cinema.
Behind Enemy Lines draws heavily of the star personas of Gene Hackman and to a lesser extent Owen Wilson. Hackman in particular benefits from a script which gives him genuine climactic choices to make whilst Wilson has at least a mini arc from disillusionment back into the military fold. Sadly, Josh Hartnett, Tom Sizemore, Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana and Jason Isaacs are not so well served.
Consequently, and for all Black Hawk Down’s accuracy and worthiness, it is a video game movie where the events played out are bereft of wider context be it at a social, moral or character level. The conflicts of Behind Enemy Lines are writ large but at least seem to have something, no matter how trite to say.
I appreciate this is an unusual opinion. Black Hawk Down scores a credible 75% on Rotten Tomatoes freshness meter whilst Behind Enemy Lines scores in the low 30s. Personally, I will never watch Black Hawk Down again but may well indulge in Behind Enemy Lines’ guilty pleasures on future occasions.
Posted by nlvp at September 22, 2002 10:36 PM