Combat with no apologies

Rating: 10/10 (13 September 2002)

No matter what country you are from, whether Austria or Australia, if you have never volunteered to stand in harms way - then you shouldn't be allowed to criticize this film.
There is no hype, no majesty, no glory - there is blood, there is pain, there is anguish, and there is death. That is combat - and that is accurately and graphically depicted here. This is not a telling of the trials of the country of Somalia, it is the depiction of less than 72 hours in the lives of some American soldiers.
The comments that the movie drags, that the combat is so long and you don't get into the characters, that it's all American Hollywood - those writers have missed the point completely. This is a movie that sums up the reason that men have fought and died since time immemorial - it is said best with the statement not from the movie - "We few, we band of brothers".

These men have no deep motivation that we need to find. Two things that some of the movie watchers may have missed - first, the US Army is all volunteer. So to be a soldier you have to volunteer. Second, to be in Delta Force or the Rangers, you have to volunteer again. These soldiers are fighting - and dying - because they swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to obey the lawful orders of those officers over them.
Combat as depicted in BHD is what the face of combat really is - Tom Sizemore as the Colonel looking back into his Humvee where all of his men are either dead or wounded - and then going back in. That is an American soldier being depicted. From the perspective of this one time ground pounder, this is as real as it gets. No bloodless wounds where the soldier who gets shot falls to the side and off camera - a squirting femoral artery right into the eyes is what real combat is. For those of you who thought this movie dragged on - that's combat, and that's reality. There is no moral to this story, no Private Ryan inner motivation - this is just pure combat - as it really is.