Focus is the reason Black Hawk Down is a really good movie

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2002)

Black Hawk Down **** One of the best movies of 2001.
A story about a moment; a story about a feeling, a story about an accomplishment can be really good or even great when focused. Black Hawk Down does this brilliantly. The moment is 16 hours, 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia. The feeling is confusion. The accomplishment is doing the job you are trained to do. Black Hawk Down stays focused for 2 ½ hours on the lives of couple hundred U.S. soldiers that are ordered into a very dangerous situation to arrest two men that the United States and United Nations believes are stopping the distribution of food to Somalia civilians. The men to be arrested are in a market district of Mogadishu that is very heavily defended. The firepower provided to accomplish the mission is restricted by Pentagon or Washington D.C. directives.
Given their orders, the U.S. soldiers move in for what is planned to be a 2 or 3 hour mission. The arrests are made but then two Black Hawk helicopters are shot down. The soldiers are ordered to secure the crash sites and wait for the rescue units to come in and retrieve them. The well-armed and organized Mogadishu fighters that control this part of the city, hold down the U.S. soldiers. The U.S. convey that is moving in to rescue and retrieve is lost on the narrow and unmarked streets of the city. Roadblocks have changed the planned route of entry and egress. Overhead cameras on surveillance helicopters are sending pictures to the command post. Routing instructions are useless because the convoy passes the turn points before instructions can be relayed. All the while, the men in the convoy, the men moving toward and at the crash sites, and the men with the prisoners are under intense and constant enemy fire.
Even after watching for 2 ½ hours it is impossible for me to imagine the fear and confusion that must have been weighting on these men. Ridley Scott uses all the special effects technology available to him as a filmmaker to make bullets, rockets, blood and guts seem real or at least terrifying. And after 16 hours (the real time for this battle) these men stayed true to their mission. They accomplished what they were trained, asked, ordered to do. Only sixteen Americans died which seems amazing when watching this reenactment of the battle.
The best line of the movie comes at the end when one soldier explains to another that he doesn't even want to try and explain what he does and why he does it for the people back home. `They won't understand.' I know he's right. This movie knows he's right. And that's what makes Black Hawk Down a good movie. The movie stays focused on the 16-hour battle and the U.S. soldiers doing their job and the conditions under which they had to do this job. Focus is the reason Black Hawk Down is a really good movie.

On a side note: whether you see the movie or not, I highly recommend the book by Mark Bowden. Bowden's book relates the same confusion, fear, and resolve that we see in the movie. While focused on the 16-hour battle, the book is able to go beyond the fight and tells us about some of the men. It also sets up the political situation that contributed to U.S. soldiers being put into this situation. The epilogue to the book is a fascinating, yet brief, telling how Bowden was able to find this story and learn what happen so he could write the book.
Read the book. Go see the movie. Both are ****.