Chaos and confusion reign.

Rating: Null/10 (4 May 2002)

"Black Hawk Down" takes great pains to portray war as chaos, not some idealized situation in which heroic all-American people from a hand-picked assortment of ethnic and religious archetypes are first beaten up, then mysteriously rally and vanquish the insidious enemy.
Instead, it shows the visceral trauma inflicted upon what in hindsight appears to have been an incredibly poorly thought-out mission, and acknowledges that in war, plans can and do go horribly wrong. That's quite a valid message, and it should provoke thought with respect to future peace-keeping operations, rules of engagement, and expectations with regards to urban operations.
The lesson to take from the movie is the same one learned by the US administration of the time: sanitary, controlled small strike forces are not panaceas. Rangers and Delta Force soldiers may be tough and trained, but they're human, and overconfidence in technological superiority may blind planners from the dangers posed by a numerous, determined foe. Fighting in built-up areas is not clean, and nobody should have expected it to be a cakewalk -- nor should the plan have been so fragile, so contingent on everything going as planned.
It's a fairly decent movie, then. I am more than a little suspicious of the way the American soldiers are portrayed -- e.g. walking (standing, not crouched...) in the center of the streets at times, a seemingly magical grenade toss into a fairly high (and as far as I recall, no Somali ever tosses a grenade in the movie...), small window across a street, and so forth... if they really moved so incautiously,
I would have expected a much higher body count, since in reality they weren't protected by a screenwriter. And the "comic relief" segments strike me as forced, and they detract from the horror of it all.