Politics be damned...

Rating: Null/10 (9 September 2002)

There's simply no need for political discussion in this film. It's a story of 18 hours in the lives of 119 guys from the United States. During those 18 hours, these men stood fast against the most overwhelming military odds since Picket's Charge. At least 100 to 1 and some experts place it closer to 1000 to 1 at certain points during the battle; these US soldiers did exactly what we pay them to do. They fought and some died. Harsh, but that's the reality of the Infantryman's life. We don't pay them to "project power", we don't enlist them to, "provide a centerpoint of US Foreign Policy." We don't have them in our Service for any other reason than to kill people and blow those people's things up. Simple concept. Scott managed to do about as well as could be done with this struggle. We have a group of barely differentiated characters thrown into a situation that is as far from normal human experience as it can get. The killed Somalis, they blew up Somali's things. Some of them died in the midst of the most intense individual combat since WW-II. Even during the height of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnamese city of Hue our forces never met as large a number of enemy troops or an enemy soldiery that was as careless with their own lives as Task Force Ranger met in Mogadishu. Blackhawk Down is not a story of the politics of our presence in Somalia. It's not a documentary showing the failings of the UN's attempt to bring civilization to war torn Africa. It has nothing to do with why we were there, should we have been there, what went wrong to put us there, should we have been hunting Aidid or anything else. It's a story of the grunts on the ground watching their friends die, getting p***ed of by that and killing the people who killed their friends. Don't try to put a lot of moralistic or ethical background into it. Sit down and watch the movie. Don't ask why these guys are killing and dying. Don't ask who they are and what they're thinking. Don't ask why they joined the Army, volunteered to become Airborne and then volunteered to become Rangers. These facts aren't particularly relevant to the story. Suffice it to say that they did volunteer, volunteer and volunteer. They looked themselves in the face and said, "Yep, I want to be as good as I can be and when it comes time to kill people and destroy their stuff, I want to do it as a Ranger." If you absolutely have to know what they're thinking, listen to the line spoken by Ewan McGregor as Specialist Grimes; "Wow, this sucks." That is the sum of what a Paratrooper in combat allows themself for emotional introspection. "This sucks... Now let's go kill the people that are making it suck."