Too American focused

Rating: Null/10 (11 October 2004)

There is no doubt that the film is well shot and edited, with very punchy action scenes and an awesome soundtrack. But I was still disappointed, being very familiar with the book.
Two things come across in the book but less so in the film. The first is the fact that the soldiers survived only because of (i) the Delta soldiers, who remained composed and effective when the plan had gone to hell and (ii) the close support of the 'Little Bird' helicopters. Although the Delta soldiers' status is hinted at in the film, the impression one receives from the book is that a lot of the Rangers really struggled to cope when things got out of hand, and would not have survived without Delta's leadership (and, let's face it, ruthless killing ability and training). I think on a similar line the film also should have shown the frustration felt by some soldiers with their 5.56mm ammunition, which tended to make surgical incisions rather than knocking the enemy down, hence Delta Sergeant Randy Shugart preferred to use an old Vietnam era 7.62mm M14 - a similar conclusion reached by the British in the Falklands War.
The second thing absent from the film is anything substantial of the Somali perspective. It's all very well inferring that the Americans came with the best of intentions to save starving people from Aideed, but the fact is they never had appropriate local intelligence to distinguish friends from foe and, by the time of the raid, had alienated a number of the Somalis - enough to make a huge crowd want to kill them. The entrenched tribal conflicts weren't going to disappear overnight, and it was naive at best for the US to assume that the tribal culture behind those conflicts might disappear just because a few elite soldiers took out some of the ringleaders. This is alluded to in the conversations between General Garrison and his prisoner, but overall the film gives more of an impression of heroic young soldiers fighting a lunatic mob.
Other than that, or for those only wanting a bit of war pornography, the film is, as I said, exceptionally well shot and with the full benefit of modern technology, to give battle scenes the sort of violent realism made famous by Saving Private Ryan. But there are many far more thought provoking, equally well filmed war movies that I would recommend ahead of BHD (or SPR for that matter): check out the US Library of Congress reissued version of All Quiet on the Western Front for the godfather of all war films, and also Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket and, more recently, The Thin Red Line (1998 version dir Terrence Malik).