Reviews

There's simply no need for political discussion in this film. It's a story of 18 hours in the lives of 119 guys from the United States. During those 18 hours, these men stood fast against the most overwhelming military odds since Picket's Charge. At least 100 to 1 and some experts place it closer to 1000 to 1 at certain points during the battle; these US soldiers did exactly what we pay them to do. They fought and some died. Harsh, but that's the reality of the Infantryman's life. We don't pay them to "project power", we don't enlist them to, "provide a centerpoint of US Foreign Policy." We don't have them in our Service for any other reason than to kill people and blow those people's things up. Simple concept. Scott managed to do about as well as could be done with this struggle. We have a group of barely differentiated characters thrown into a situation that is as far from normal human experience as it can get. The killed Somalis, they blew up Somali's things. Some of them died in the midst of the most intense individual combat since WW-II. Even during the height of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnamese city of Hue our forces never met as large a number of enemy troops or an enemy soldiery that was as careless with their own lives as Task Force Ranger met in Mogadishu. Blackhawk Down is not a story of the politics of our presence in Somalia. It's not a documentary showing the failings of the UN's attempt to bring civilization to war torn Africa. It has nothing to do with why we were there, should we have been there, what went wrong to put us there, should we have been hunting Aidid or anything else. It's a story of the grunts on the ground watching their friends die, getting p***ed of by that and killing the people who killed their friends. Don't try to put a lot of moralistic or ethical background into it. Sit down and watch the movie. Don't ask why these guys are killing and dying. Don't ask who they are and what they're thinking. Don't ask why they joined the Army, volunteered to become Airborne and then volunteered to become Rangers. These facts aren't particularly relevant to the story. Suffice it to say that they did volunteer, volunteer and volunteer. They looked themselves in the face and said, "Yep, I want to be as good as I can be and when it comes time to kill people and destroy their stuff, I want to do it as a Ranger." If you absolutely have to know what they're thinking, listen to the line spoken by Ewan McGregor as Specialist Grimes; "Wow, this sucks." That is the sum of what a Paratrooper in combat allows themself for emotional introspection. "This sucks... Now let's go kill the people that are making it suck."

Blackhawk Down is accused of having a lack of characterization, confusing story lines, pro-American/anti-Somali bias. No care given to the thousands of Somali dead. It's an American movie about American forces. Less than 200 Americans going to war with an entire Somali clan. Yep, it's got an American bias. Want to know why? Because the soldiers of Taskforce Ranger were American.

It's got an anti-Somali bias as well. Want to know why? Here's a clue kids, none of the Somali's had to be there. They could have done what so many of their countrymen did and hid on the floor of their homes until the Americans were gone. No Somali mothers had to hide a pistol behind their infant child in order to play on American sympathies and get a closer shot at the US forces.

Yes, there were innocents who were killed and injured. That's the nature of warfare. It's not good, it's not right, it simply is.

For you who've never dived to the ground and prayed to everything you hold holy that the buttons on your shirt aren't just a bit too thick and because of it you're going to take a bullet in the head, get over yourselves. The opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan showed one kind of war, the war that gets front page coverage on the newspapers of the world, the kind of war that makes heros everyone knows by name.

Blackhawk Down shows the kind of war that we fight now. It's dirty, it's ugly, it's bloody. It involves crapping your pants in terror and sprinting through machinegun fire for someone you thoroughly despise simply because he's a fellow soldier. It's about young men being sent to places that some couldn't even locate on a map to fight other young men for reasons that aren't even clear to the government that sent them. It shows the kind of wars the world is going to see for a very long time.

Desert Storm was aberrant. It was unusual. It was atypical. It was a "good" war; fought for "Righteousness" and "Truth". It was a war against a defined evil perpetrated on national television and available from any satellite transponder on the planet. Sorry, that's not the norm any more.

Blackhawk Down is about the realities of modern war. It's about simple errors costing the lives of 18 young men who wanted little more than to get back home to drink a beer. It's about thousands upon thousands of people running to the scene of an ongoing battle and then wondering why they were shot.

For the few Somalis who were honestly innocent and were honestly caught by US fire before they could get away, for them I grieve. For the vast majority of the Somalis who charged into the Bakara Market neighborhood knowing full well that Habr Gidr was having its showdown with Taskforce Ranger, for them I have nothing but scorn. To the simpleton who claims that the "world grieves for the thousand Somali dead", I say, "get over yourself." They came, they shot, they were cut down in the streets.

Ridley Scott did a masterful job of showing an event that has shaped global military policy. More important than that, he showed the faces of the anonymous kids who fought and died and couldn't have cared less about that policy.

War is chaos, Blackhawk Down is chaos.

The movie doesn't pretend to describe the political or social background of the events portrayed. The book itself doesn't give much coverage to it either. It's a description of the incredible valor and heroism of a very small group of men fighting to stay alive in the chaos resulting from thousands upon thousands of complete strangers deciding to kill them. Any time the KIA ratio is 18 to 1000, it's a story worthy of both print and film.

A brilliant piece of tongue-in-cheek work. Played with magnificent straightness and forthrightness. This movie has so many things lacking in modern film. It has mad scientists, deranged religious maniacs, New York City, Italian detectives, hard-bitten police chiefs, loves lost, loves found, loves misplaced and never looked for. We get to see the deranged work of genius put to the evil task of eliminating the impure before the second coming of the Messiah. Major bummer that He's a regular patron of the 'Hotel Quicky." Watch it, laugh at it, enjoy it. It's worth your time.