Taut and Engaging Story of the Lost Men

Rating: 10/10 (12 June 2002)

If you can forgive it for not having the easy to follow rent-a-plot of other war movies, such as 'Saving Private Ryan', 'The Dirty Dozen', or 'The Great Escape', then you can quickly see just how exciting and different a movie 'Black Hawk Down' is.
Some chastise it for being too impersonal about its characters, and as a result we don't exactly know what to feel when they quickly become engulfed in a firefight in the blood-soaked streets of Somalia. What you should try to see is that this is the point: these were "the lost men", who most of us would not understand if they explained what they did and why, and most of us would not care anyway. While the movie does occasionally slip away and have its moments where the soldiers wax philosophical in the heat of battle, this moments are still poignant and part of the much larger picture.
The battle scenes (or scene, I should say, as the bulk of the film's 2 hrs. and 20 mins is spent in the constant exchange of bullets) are without question the most intense and well-designed in any war film since "Saving Private Ryan". The percieved "lack" of character depth and identity, I say again, is partly intentional because when faced with this kind of situation, like the character Hoot Gibson says, it isn't about politics or love or hate or having control over who lives and who dies. It's about the guy next to you, and getting out alive. THAT'S what mattered to these guys, and that's what the movie portrays.
The film is ripped to the bone, suspenseful yet tragic, with a gritty and uncompromising twist on the genre. It is a rare achievement for filmmaking of any type: we know who we're rooting for, yet it's tough to tell who's the good guy and who's not; the film is clear about it's objectivity yet has an eerie moral ambiguity. It is not a character study, it's a tone poem, about the nature of a war and the men who fight in it, and not about the politics or the deep subthemes or any of that crap which most people decide is most important because it holds the key to getting re-elected.
Mark Bowden, who wrote the book on which the film is based, gave a perfect opening quote to his manuscript, one which adequately sums up the message of all of it:
"It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner."