An Ill-Considered Movie about an Ill-Considered Raid

Rating: 1/10 (15 July 2007)

Letting Jerry Bruckheimer produce this movie was a mistake. Bruckheimer's gift is the creation of stupendous summer blockbusters with good guys, bad guys, mad stunts and huge explosions. I can understand him wanting to handle more serious material to gain credibility but "Blackhawk Down" is not one of his better films.
The movie has won quite a few technical awards. Ridley Scott's direction is fantastic, and the special/sound effects are well-rendered. The movie cast are top-notch and do an admirable job. What lets the movie down is the script.
In "Blackhawk Down" the Somalis of Mogadishu are portrayed as a baying, faceless mob. Little or no effort is made to explain why both civilians and militiamen reacted so violently to the botched US "Gothic Serpent" raid depicted in the movie. A previous US air attack in downtown Mogadishu had killed many tribal elders and innocent civilians. This generated a lot of public support for the armed militias. Ordinary Somalis began to look to the warlords for protection from what they saw as unprovoked American attacks.
No distinction is made between the Somalis caught up in the fighting and the combatants. No accurate figures exist for the number of Somalis killed during the fighting although the movie estimate is 1,000. It is unlikely that all of this number were Somali militiamen. Many ordinary Somalis were caught up in the streetfighting, pinned down and killed by fire from both sides. No records were kept at the time but aid agency estimates put the number of Somali civilian dead and wounded as high as 3,000.
While "Blackhawk Down" is meant to be a tribute to the courage of the US soldiers who fought and died in the 1st Battle of Mogadishu, it is also guilty of lazy racism and a selective, revisionist view of events. The Pakistani UN forces (who provided rescue vehicles and troops for American casualties) are depicted as surly and uncooperative in the movie. Pakistani UN forces were not afraid of a fight in Mogadishu and had lost 24 men killed in a single action against Somali militiamen before the American raid was launched. The Malaysian UN element is not mentioned, despite providing additional rescue vehicles and troops for the evacuation of US casualties.
IMDb is perhaps the wrong place to make political statements, but "Blackhawk Down" is little more than a gung-ho propaganda film in the tradition of such dire revisionism as John Wayne's "The Green Berets". It can be viewed as a gritty and realistic depiction of urban combat against incredible odds. However, it is also guilty of concentrating solely on the experiences of US troops without explaining why they were there.
"Blackhawk Down" relies on the biased (after 4 US journalists were killed in riots in Mogadishu) American media perspective of events in Somalia far too much. Its one concession to reality is the admission that the "Gothic Serpent" raid should never have been launched.
Jerry Bruckheimer is a great producer and Ridley Scott is a fine director but "Blackhawk Down" is little more than a skewed snapshot of a greater tragedy. It is one of the few war films that I wish I had never seen.