The Ten Best Films of 2001 - One To Five
Hard to believe it's finally here ... tomorrow morning, the Hollywood community will wake up very early (5:30 AM out on the West Coast), and the rest of us will watch the live broadcasts and scour the internet for the complete list, as the 74th Annual Academy Award nominations will finally be announced, and Oscar Season 74 will finally begin! I've not made a final prediction for the various nominations, because I'll have a feeling I'll have plenty of work to do just trying to predict the actual winners from the nominees they will be announcing over the few weeks before the actual Academy Awards ceremony. So instead of predictions, I'll conclude my two part series revealing my own personal choices for the best film achievements of 2001, as I reveal the top five films of the year.
5. BLACK HAWK DOWN
Three years ago, Steven Spielberg redefined the war film, and forever set a new standard for how to portray the reality of the brutality of war on film. Ridley Scott, one of our most accomplished and stylistic film directors, takes that same kind of style and sustains it over an entire film. Black Hawk Down is an unflinching, brutal, and powerful portrait of modern warfare, coming at a time when American forces find themselves embroiled in combat again across the globe. Ridley Scott has already proven what a masterful epic director he can be in his past films, and he takes the impossible task of presenting a chaotic true war story in a manner where we can actually follow what is going on, and feel like we're actually there, experiencing the carnage as it occurs. This film chronicles the true story of what happened in 1993, when U.S. forces were attempting to go in to Somalia to quickly capture a Somali warlord who was withholding food from millions of Somalis. Scott sets the stage brilliantly with a powerful opening credits sequence which explains the historical context for why America was there and how the situation was unfolding in Somalia. Once one of the Black Hawk helicopters goes down, the film never lets up in portraying what became the longest sustained military engagement since the Vietnam War at that time, which resulted in the deaths of 18 American soldiers and the horrifying portrait of Somalis dragging the corpse of a soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, the image we all remember from that conflict. Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, and the rest of the cast all give solid performances. Even though the film does not have time to develop these characters in depth, the film is ultimately about the battle, and it was wise to keep its focus there. It's not a typical war film by any means, and by that, it transcends its genre. It's a technically accomplished film, portraying a powerful war story which doesn't present its take on the battle one way or the other, except to simply say that war is hell. Will we ever have a day where war will no longer exist? Of course, watching the movie through the eyes of the war on terrorism may have affected me even more, but either way, this is a powerful testament to the spirit of American fighting men that is clearly needed at a time like this.
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