Ridley Scott is known primarily as an “action director”, but his films rely so heavily on subtle impressions and evocative imagery that to associate him so closely with a degraded genre is to do an injustice to his real talents. The fact of the matter is that Scott is one of our most artistic directors, a master of mood, pacing and seamless exposition who has the rare ability to hint at larger ideas using smaller and surprisingly delicate visual motifs. His Best Director Oscar was well-deserved for the beautiful-looking “Gladiator”, although that film was far from the best of last year’s bunch.

His follow-up, “Black Hawk Down”, is technically flawless, much as “Gladiator” was. Scott has taken the story of elite U.S. army outfits waging street-to-street warfare with a Somali militia and cast it as a personal vision of loyalty, teamwork, and mortality. As such, the film is immensely entertaining. The mission is laid out clearly, the personalities manage to stand out above all those crew-cuts just long enough to allow us a foothold in the story, and the battle sequence, which occupies most of the film, is often nothing less than harrowing. In terms of capturing the brutal realities of combat, “Black Hawk Down” is a cousin of “Saving Private Ryan”, although, unlike Spielberg, Scott shows welcome restraint in the sheer volume of bloodshed even if the splattering deaths he does show are equal to Spielberg’s battlefield abattoirs. Sam Fuller, in the documentary “The Typewriter, The Rifle, and the Movie Camera”, tells Tim Robbins that the truth about war could never be captured on celluloid because audiences weren’t ready to see soldiers being blown to bits— literally— rather than falling neatly in a heroic heap after taking an invisible bullet to the gut. Lately, however, a few filmmakers have taken up the challenge to prove Fuller wrong. There is a new attention to the vulnerability of the flesh: in “Three Kings” David O. Russell shows in clinical detail what a bullet does when it enters a body, Spielberg was almost ghoulish in giving us bodies that couldn’t stay in one piece, and now Scott has joined the ranks. A hand shot off, legs blown clean from a torso, and rockets shredding a man whole are both fetishistic and properly somber: Scott’s richly rendered gore emphasizes human fragility.

“Black Hawk Down” is also about the esprit de corps among the soldiers serving as ‘peacekeepers’ in East Africa, a theme similar to the one in “Gladiator”. At the end of the film, one of the soldiers tells another that no one at home understands why soldiers fight. “It’s about the man next to you,” he says, which is a follow-up line to one of his earlier lines, “Once someone starts shooting at you, politics go right out the window.” Interestingly, “Black Hawk Down” is a war film about professional soldiers, not young Americans drafted out of high school to fight against their will. Most of these soldiers are young, some of them are naïve, but all of them have chosen to be there, and that makes for a nice wrinkle to the story that Scott nails masterfully. Whereas drafted soldiers in Vietnam or World War II films often march amid the subtext of why, exactly, they are fighting, and for whom, the men in “Black Hawk Down” are simply doing a job for which they have been rigorously trained. What moves you in this film is their loyalty and professionalism, and their absolute unwillingness to abandon each other; the best of humanity emerges even as it seems perilously close to vanishing altogether. While Josh Hartnett’s Matt Eversmann, the film’s moral center, occasionally brings out certain larger questions of the United States’ motive and purpose in Somalia, his destiny is not to learn why they are fighting, but for whom they are fighting-each other, “the man next to you”.

However, Scott has crafted a rich film that touches on a great many points of interest but settles on the only one that seems to matter to him— or, should we say, to his producer, Jerry Bruckheimer— the soldiers’ commitment to each other, played up as the camaraderie of a football locker-room. By touching briefly on so many issues and leaving them aside, Scott leaves a central void at the film’s heart, and so shots like the Somali man carrying a dead child, or the coffins loaded into the cargo plane— shots that would have added depth and humanity to the film— are rendered pointless. As the film plays, a creeping anxiety builds over something that has little to do with the quality of the filmmaking onscreen. After the events of last September, and now, as we find ourselves at an interim stage of the war in the Middle East, one would expect a Bruckheimer film to be an exercise in chest-thumping patriotism, and though it is clearly pro-American, Scott tones it down because he is too much of an artist to succumb to the usual Bruckheimer party line. Yet he adds nothing of his own besides his creative vision. Though “Black Hawk Down” is a war film released in a time of war, with distinct parallels between the two conflicts, Scott has nothing to say about Somalia, about U.S. foreign policy, or even anything about war in an abstract sense.

And this is why “Black Hawk Down”, which is, all things considered, a gutless piece of filmmaking, ultimately loses whatever intrinsic value its director has given it. By saying nothing, Scott dooms the movie.

The problem with “Black Hawk Down” is that the story demands a response to a central imbalance, one which Scott ignores. It’s this: 19 U.S. soldiers were killed in contrast to over 1000 Somalis, roughly a 1 to 50 ratio. In most history books this would be written up as a slaughter, but Scott skews the film so that the audience cares only about the 19, and not at all about the 1000. There are good guys and bad guys, clearly defined, and the human cost to the bad guys is entirely unimportant. The film demands that the audience sympathize with the tiny band of Americans surrounded by hoards of “skinnies”— armed militia, really nothing more than a well-armed streetgang— and this creates a staggering moral distortion. Now, this isn’t any different than any other war movie. There are good guys and bad guys, and the audience knows exactly who to root for. The rules of drama require such distinctions if a war film is to work on a basic level. In “Black Hawk Down”, however, there is such a strong emphasis on the physical human cost of war on one side that the lack of such emphasis on the other is all the more glaring. An American is shot in the pelvis, and we suffer through his gut-wrenching death throes, but meanwhile, on a nearby rooftop, an army gunship sweeps overhead and wipes out dozens of Somalis in a scene that is uncomfortably similar to one of those National Geographic specials in which a helicopter zooms over a herd of loping zebras. A film that pays such loving detail to our human mortality eventually reveals a dark selectivity. At first, you can’t believe your eyes. At first, you can’t believe that such a movie could come to life in our supposedly enlightened civilization. But after awhile, there it is: in Scott’s film American lives are worth more than others. This moral distortion is inexcusable even for Scott, who is not American and therefore might seem to warrant the protection of neutrality. Not so. War affects everyone; death knows no borders. This is the argument made by the film itself, one it completely cancels in Scott’s failure to live up to his own superficial humanism.

To castigate Scott for his film’s appalling lack of universal morality is to miss a larger point, however. Could Ridley Scott have made a provocative film that questioned the United States military? Could Scott have humanized the Somalis? Could Scott have used this story to make us reassess our opinion about the current crisis? And would such attempts be impossible because of government censorship or merely commercial concerns? The answer to the last question, if I have it correctly, is frightening, because the answer is both: government censorship is no longer distinguishable from commercial concerns. Call it pre-emptive censorship: a protest film cannot be made because the public will not pay to see it, the public already having been heavily influenced by television and print media to adopt the government’s policies. The battle for public opinion is already fought by the time audiences go to the moviehouse, raising the possibility that films are now virtually impotent as a form of social or political criticism.

In light of this, “Black Hawk Down” is a terrifying mirror of the moral and political climate in the United States, and a bad omen for American art. In the larger sphere of aesthetics, there is no reason to be upset at Scott’s moral failure. As an accomplished director exploring the tints and shades of his visual palette, Scott has every right to focus on the expression of an idea, of visual schemata, or maybe just a single, highly localized theme. A work of art shouldn’t have to bear the weight of ideology or morality. Still, one cannot escape a simple fact: war polarizes, even in art. One can be a hawk or a dove, or simply take the detached position of the humanist who bemoans the waste of life. One can choose to openly philosophize or poeticize about sundry cosmic questions, as in “The Thin Red Line” or even “Full Metal Jacket”. But a war film is a peculiar kind of cinematic expression, one which seems to demand at the very least a strong moral position about what is happening onscreen, whether implied or explicit. Artists who abhor messages do not make full-scale big-budget war movies. Thus, in making “Black Hawk Down”, Scott comes across as an artist punching a clock for a regime, a company man lacking any trace of personal conviction. That’s fine for the usual stable of hacks that Bruckheimer uses to trot out his disgusting brand of patriotism, but Scott is one of our foremost directors, and for him to remain silent and even to facilitate the ascendancy of a narrow and inhuman worldview is a lapse in courage that may sadly prove symptomatic to moviemaking in our time.

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