As good a film covering the events of 3 October, 1993 is likely to get.

Rating: Null/10 (15 June 2002)

Blackhawk Down is accused of having a lack of characterization, confusing story lines, pro-American/anti-Somali bias. No care given to the thousands of Somali dead. It's an American movie about American forces. Less than 200 Americans going to war with an entire Somali clan. Yep, it's got an American bias. Want to know why? Because the soldiers of Taskforce Ranger were American.
It's got an anti-Somali bias as well. Want to know why? Here's a clue kids, none of the Somali's had to be there. They could have done what so many of their countrymen did and hid on the floor of their homes until the Americans were gone. No Somali mothers had to hide a pistol behind their infant child in order to play on American sympathies and get a closer shot at the US forces.
Yes, there were innocents who were killed and injured. That's the nature of warfare. It's not good, it's not right, it simply is.
For you who've never dived to the ground and prayed to everything you hold holy that the buttons on your shirt aren't just a bit too thick and because of it you're going to take a bullet in the head, get over yourselves. The opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan showed one kind of war, the war that gets front page coverage on the newspapers of the world, the kind of war that makes heros everyone knows by name.
Blackhawk Down shows the kind of war that we fight now. It's dirty, it's ugly, it's bloody. It involves crapping your pants in terror and sprinting through machinegun fire for someone you thoroughly despise simply because he's a fellow soldier. It's about young men being sent to places that some couldn't even locate on a map to fight other young men for reasons that aren't even clear to the government that sent them. It shows the kind of wars the world is going to see for a very long time.
Desert Storm was aberrant. It was unusual. It was atypical. It was a "good" war; fought for "Righteousness" and "Truth". It was a war against a defined evil perpetrated on national television and available from any satellite transponder on the planet. Sorry, that's not the norm any more.
Blackhawk Down is about the realities of modern war. It's about simple errors costing the lives of 18 young men who wanted little more than to get back home to drink a beer. It's about thousands upon thousands of people running to the scene of an ongoing battle and then wondering why they were shot.
For the few Somalis who were honestly innocent and were honestly caught by US fire before they could get away, for them I grieve. For the vast majority of the Somalis who charged into the Bakara Market neighborhood knowing full well that Habr Gidr was having its showdown with Taskforce Ranger, for them I have nothing but scorn. To the simpleton who claims that the "world grieves for the thousand Somali dead", I say, "get over yourself." They came, they shot, they were cut down in the streets.
Ridley Scott did a masterful job of showing an event that has shaped global military policy. More important than that, he showed the faces of the anonymous kids who fought and died and couldn't have cared less about that policy.
War is chaos, Blackhawk Down is chaos.
The movie doesn't pretend to describe the political or social background of the events portrayed. The book itself doesn't give much coverage to it either. It's a description of the incredible valor and heroism of a very small group of men fighting to stay alive in the chaos resulting from thousands upon thousands of complete strangers deciding to kill them. Any time the KIA ratio is 18 to 1000, it's a story worthy of both print and film.