Black Hawk Down, QT’s No. 1 pick, carries an ancient, pre-ironic conviction that courage and loyalty are enduring moral goods.
Quentin Tarantino has no plans to shoot his tenth — and supposedly final — film anytime soon. But he’s still dominating cultural conversations simply by talking into a microphone. On Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast, he unveiled his 20 favorite films of the 21st century. The selections bear the unmistakable fingerprints of cinema’s most celebrated former video-store clerk turned auteur browsing his own mental shelves, pulling cases that thrill him regardless of what the cinematic high priests think.
A devotee of Pauline Kael — the doyenne of film criticism who helped rescue Citizen Kane from obscurity and crown it the greatest film ever made — Tarantino knows that oddball picks can reshape how we see the medium. His list swings from the expected (Fincher’s Zodiac, Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood) to the inspired (Dunkirk over Oppenheimer for Nolan; Tony Scott’s locomotive thriller Unstoppable, the train as kaiju, essentially) to the surprising (The Passion of the Christ, albeit, this isn’t even Mel Gibson’s best film about faith, let alone the finest Christian picture of the century) to the frankly baffling (I, too, have a soft spot for the Bear Jew, but why Cabin Fever over Thanksgiving?).
Sitting at numero uno is Ridley Scott’s two-and-a-half-hour combat opus Black Hawk Down. The choice offers insight into Tarantino’s cinematic sensibility and how these lists are made. It’s also a Big Kahuna Burger–sized middle finger to the tastemakers who trashed the film on arrival and then pretended it didn’t exist.
Scott throws us into the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, where a U.S. mission to snatch lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid collapsed into a 17-hour urban nightmare. Two Black Hawks shot down. Nineteen American soldiers dead. Somali casualties possibly in the thousands. Working from Mark Bowden’s bestselling account, Scott marshaled a murderer’s row of talent: Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana, a granite-jawed Sam Shepard chomping cigars in the command room like they owe him money, and Tom Sizemore delivering what may be the performance of his career as the embattled convoy commander barking “Well, shoot back!” into his radio while the city detonates around him. Orlando Bloom and Tom Hardy appear before anyone knew their names, the former plummeting from a helicopter in one of the film’s first gut-punches.
Few thought that America wanted a brutal war film mere weeks after September 11. They were wrong. Black Hawk Down grossed $173 million worldwide and won two Oscars for its technical craft — Film Editing and Sound, the below-the-line categories where the Academy safely quarantines violent excellence. Yet the movie has never cracked the prestige canon. You won’t find it on the New York Times, IndieWire, Sight and Sound, or Rolling Stone lists of the century’s finest. The critical establishment took one look at Scott’s achievement and shoved it into the oubliette.
Actually, they did something worse. They declared it morally unclean. Sean Burns of Philadelphia Weekly called it “racist crap” and said it “often plays like Birth of a Nation: The Next Generation.” Elvis Mitchell of the Times accused the film of “glumly staged racism.” The Hartford Courant denounced its “mind-blowing insensitivity.” Scott’s sin? Telling the story almost entirely from the perspective of American soldiers. The charge is ridiculous. This was a real battle, adapted from a meticulous work of journalism, and war films have almost always centered on one side of the fight. It’s also not like we humanized the Nazis in Saving Private Ryan, a film that critics swooned over just three years earlier.
The stigma lingered as it drifted into used-DVD-bin purgatory: good enough to snag a couple of technical awards, but too radioactive to canonize. It became a dad-on-the-couch flick. The kind you talk about with your boys but don’t confess to liking on a first date if you want a second one.
Tarantino, thankfully, doesn’t genuflect before the altar of film snobbery. He’s a genre purist who doesn’t give a damn whether a work flatters fashionable anxieties. “This is the only movie that actually goes completely for an Apocalypse Now sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling, and I think it achieves it,” he said. “My heart was going through the entire runtime. It had me and never let me go.”
When seen on his terms, Black Hawk Down has few peers. Scott orchestrates chaos with a precision that borders on the symphonic. The camera plunges through dust and blood and cordite, never flinching from dismemberment, yet never losing spatial coherence. Hans Zimmer’s percussive score drives you forward like the convoy itself, with two Elvis needle drops reminding you this is still, somehow, a Bruckheimer production. You don’t just watch it. By the time the 10th Mountain Division’s relief column finally rolls in, you feel like you’ve earned the right to exhale — and maybe even pick up an I Survived Black Hawk Down T-shirt from a rack at a strip mall outside of Disney. You know the spot. Inflatable magento alligator. Next to the “medicinal” Peruvian parsley emporium. Yeah, that one.
That the writer-director behind the Grindhouse double-feature prizes thrills over think pieces is no surprise. There’s another view of cinema, of course. One where sight and sound serve a story that rearranges more than your central nervous system. Black Hawk Down won’t rewire your conscience the way, say, Paths of Glory does, but it’s more than cinematic Cheetos.
It carries an ancient, pre-ironic conviction that courage and loyalty are enduring moral goods, and that sometimes they look like a Delta sniper volunteering to insert into a crash site he knows he won’t leave alive. When Randy Shughart’s final letter to his wife plays over the credits — “My love, stay strong. . . . Tonight tuck my children in bed warmly” — the lump in your throat is earned through blood and bone. No smirking about American folly. No lecture on the banality of empire. Just sacrifice, honored without apology.
That kind of sincerity has become almost countercultural in American cinema. Not because Hollywood’s studio output is the Jacobin cauldron many conservatives imagine; the problem might be worse. Too many films are algorithmically neutered — mere “content” terrified of saying anything, so they say nothing at all. Black Hawk Down insists some things are worth dying for, and it dares you to call that conviction naïve while the RPGs are still shrieking overhead.
Would it top my list? No. I would want a little more meat on the ideas bone for that spot. But Tarantino is right to drag it back into daylight. And if a few silver-screen scolds shift uncomfortably in their chairs, well — that’s a cultural service too.
