Great War Movie of 2001.

Rating: Null/10 (31 July 2002)

When I first saw this movie, it was very strong. It made me want to buy the DVD so I could understand the movie. Everything in the movie was perfect.
Story: 300,000, and counting Somalis died from starvation. Warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid seized all of the ports and is giving the food to feed his army. The U.S. tried to send food with 200,000 Marines as escorts. Aidid waited until they withdrawed and started again. Now, President Clinton sent in the Rangers, Delta Force, and SOAR to remove Aidid from the region. However, on a mission to capture Aidid's advisors, one Black Hawk helicopter gets shot down by one of the Somali soldiers carrying RPG launchers. While trying to rescue the survivors, another Black Hawk helicopter gets shot down.
CHARACTERS:
As for the characters, they are great and have their own reasons for things. Sergeant Eversmann (Josh Hartnett) is just a drill sergeant in a training camp in Somalia. Lieutenant Beales had a seizure and Captain Steele put Eversmann in charge of Beales's chalk. Eversmann just joined because he wanted to make a difference, "(about the Somalis) It's not that I like them or don't like them. These people have no food, no job, no education. We can do two things: Help them, or watch the country destroy itself on CNN." However, he is in conflict on the field considering it is his first live mission and wants to do everything right.
Grimes (Ewan McGregor) is just a "desk jockey" and coffee maker. "You are actually looking at the guy that believes the commercials 'Be all you can be.' I made coffee during Desert Storm. I was sitting behind a desk while everyone got to fight in Panama." Grimes felt that his talent is being wasted while the rest of the Rangers got to fight in the past missions. When Grimes's wish finally comes true, it becomes a nightmare for him because most of Mogadishu is fighting all of the teams and just wants to stay alive. At least he gets to be successful in one scene.
Hoot is a "tough guy" warhorse, but he has some morals and was kind of like a big brother and a teacher to Eversmann.(Spoiler) "Once that first bullet flies past your head, politics and all that s*** fly out the window," was one of the good points. And at the ending, he tells Eversmann one of his great lines, "When I get home, my friends ask me, 'Hey, Hoot, why do you do this, man? Why, you're some war junkie?' I won't say a goddamn word. Why? They won't understand why we do it. They won't understand that it's all about the men next to you." He even doesn't want Eversmann to rejoin him because he probably did not want to jeopardize Eversmann's life.
Captain Steele (Jason Issacs) is upset at the Delta Force soldiers because he thinks that they lack discipline (from modifying their weapons and wearing sunglasses) and there is a rivalry between them and the Rangers. "You Delta boys are nothing but a bunch of undisciplined cowboys. Some day, you WILL need my Rangers"
Colonel McKnight (Tom Sizemore) has most of hell on his convoy. They kept getting poor intel on the locations leading to the crash sites. He lost about ten soldiers while struggling on getting the directions. Even after he is back at base, he still wants to go back to the field even when Lt. Colonel Cribbs tells him that Mcknight does not have to go back.
As for Shugart and Gordon (the people that tried to defend Durant), they were very heroic in the line of duty. I was surprised that they received the Medal Of Honor. It was too bad that it was the three of them fighting.
END CHARACTER
This movie shows the very grim reality of modern-day war. On one scene where Yurek gets separated from his team, and gets attacked by a Father and Son Somali team and Yurek leaves through a back window, Yurek slips and the boy shoots the father. It made me feel sorry for them. It also made me feel sorry for the families of the soldiers that died during the mission.
As for the start of the credits starting out as "1000 Somalis and 19 American soldiers got killed, it showed a list of the names of the soldiers that died. A person from another review complained that there were no names of the Somalis that died. To talk back at that person, it is impossible to ID the Somalis that got killed. It is even too dangerous to go there as of that time since there are still a lot of crazy militiamen.
This movie could have gotten an Emmy or Oscar award. The most dramatic scenes in my opinion were the part where Shugart and Gordon are fighting the whole city while defending Durant and the Wolcott's crash site at nighttime to dawn.
Wish they could do a segment like this on a video game.
I give this movie unlimited/10.
Seriously: 10/10