One of Ridley Scott's better pictures *SPOILERS*

Rating: 10/10 (20 August 2005)

*SPOILERS* And certainly one of the three most bloodiest war pictures I have ever seen the other two being Saving Private Ryan and We Were Soldiers. This is the story of a simple mission gone horribly horribly wrong. It happens because one idiot General (played wonderfully by Sam Shepard) orders a daylight raid in the heart of Mogadishu to capture some top level members of General Mohammad Farrah Aidid's militia. What results is nothing short of a complete disaster that turns into a military fiasco. A Black Hawk helicopter is shot down and the American General, being a true American, shouts "Leave no man behind!" despite the soon to be obvious fact that those men are already dead. So he needlessly puts more of his men's lives in serious peril resulting in yet another helicopter being shot down and more men being killed. Think he would have learned his lesson the first time? No he sends more soldiers into harm's way to recover those doomed men! By the end of the film the viewer is practically demanding that this U.S. General be shot by firing squad for extreme incompetence. The end result is that 19 U.S. soldiers and 2,000 Somalis are killed in a single day, resulting in the eventual pullout of U.S. troops after they kill Aidid. This film needed to be made to show the world both how horrid war is and the price that has to be paid in order to make the world safe and I commend Scott for having the guts to make it.