A blistering experience

Rating: 9/10 (22 December 2006)

Black Hawk Down is simultaneously bruising to watch and impossible to look away. It is not the first war movie to place us in the middle of the action so skillfully, but it is definitely one of the best and one of the most harrowing. And it is not necessarily the endless and endlessly realistic action that makes this movie such an achievement; Scott manages to say something with that action and because of that we have a better understanding of war and those who fight it.
Too much happens within the fabric of this film for me to provide a genuine summary of the plot, so I'll give a brief outline: a team of Special U.S. Forces is deployed in Mogadishu, Somalia with orders to apprehend a warlord who has created famine in his area when one of their Black Hawk helicopters is shot down and they become entangled in a never-ending battle with the Somali militia, fighting to save their own lives and the lives of the men around them.
Scott has assembled a genuinely ensemble cast with virtually no standout names at the time except for Josh Hartnett and Ewan McGregor, who both do a fine job, but the character that left the deepest impact on me was Eric Bana's Hoot. Hoot is one of the few Rangers that knows his way around war and fighting and is almost ruthless in his tactics. However, he never loses his compassion and he reveals at the end that he truly understands why he fights- "It's about the men next to you. And that's it."
The fact that this conflict was not even supposed to be war in the first place makes the movie all the more powerful. We are audience to many mistakes by the leaders of this outfit; the ground forces are led by helicopters from above and the navigators in these Black Hawks lead the Rangers astray many times. It seems to go on forever sometimes, but that is not to the detriment of the movie. On the contrary, it only adds to the reality of the situation. We are not subjected to nonstop fighting; there are moments between the soldiers and sometimes moments between the Americans and those attacking them. Even in these moments, though, Scott never relents from his indictment of war or his appreciation of the compassion of these soldiers.