Surviving Black Hawk Down, Netflix, review: cleverly captures the chaos of war
Surviving Black Hawk Down
, a Netflix historical documentary looking at the disastrous
I say 'sensible': the danger for any documentary about how awful war can be is it comes out making war look great. The original 2001 film
Surviving Black Hawk Down does its utmost to render the absolute chaos of the battle while still offering context and hindsight. It's a high-wire act, marrying calm with carnage, but film-maker Jack MacInnes, who also directed the excellent Leaving Afghanistan, follows the good documentarian's playbook to the letter.
There are first-hand accounts from the US soldiers, but there are as many from the Somalians who fought back. The three episodes are alive to the suffering and cruelty of both sides, while also, particularly in the first episode, making time for the bigger picture and questioning what the Americans were doing there in the first place.
It also notes, cleverly, that the Battle occurred at an interesting time in technological terms — this was a pre-mobile phone age, but a Somalian cameraman with a camcorder was on hand both to film the mayhem of the original mission as well as to capture the infamous footage of the US helicopter pilot, Mike Durant, who was taken prisoner. Both are interviewed at length here, in a nod to how media representations of war – filming it – are so central to our understanding of modern history.
The producers might, I thought, even have gone a little further and asked the soldiers who fought that day what they made of the movie that has enshrined them in American military legend. You can't attempt to tell a true story without addressing the abiding fictions, after all. But then Surviving Black Hawk Down is a
This is both its strength – it looks incredible; the re-enactions are movie-quality and the access is superb – as well as its weakness. Black Hawk Down the Hollywood movie embodied the controversies that always surround thrilling war stories. It might have been good to see what Ridley thought about all that.
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