World's most morally punishing film experience Ahoy!

Rating: 8/10 (27 February 2002)

Imagine the Omaha Beach landing scene from Saving Private Ryan played over two whole hours. If that sounds like something you probably would not enjoy, than you belong to the sane majority, and deserve a cookie. It also means you might be put off watching this film, for that premise was one of its great marketing elements. The truth is, you'd be missing out.
In recreating the 24 hours or so around an operation to capture a Somali warlord's top advisers, the film is a hybrid of police procedural and war movie, giving you the limited but focused scope of the former with the intensity of the latter. It also acts a horribly prescient display of a modern Western army completely underestimating a "primitive" enemy, and making everyone pay a heavy price. On paper the mission meant minimal casualties and a deployment meant to last for less than an hour. In practice, the day-long carnage cost the lives of almost 20 elite troops and around a thousand locals. It also proved utterly futile in the grand scheme of things.
Cushioned as its release was between 9/11 and the second Gulf War, BHD admirably manages to avoid the prevalent flag-waving tone and boils both sides down to nearly tribal elements, all the way to the strangely homogenous look of team America's cast: our heroes are often hard to tell from one-another, and the emphasis is on team solidarity when thrown into a living hell, not individual heroics. Josh Hartnett is wisely used as our conduit into this world, not our hero. More showy characters like Eric Bana's Delta veteran or Tom Sizemore's bullet- proof colonel manage to be both impressive for their courage and depressing for their inner hollowness and resignation.
Visually, this is astounding, and once the fireworks get going, they are relentless. This is an immersive experience, in terms of both image and sound, all the way to the music, with Hans Zimmer's genre-defining score perfectly complementing the action and giving the film's rare moments of calm a haunting quality.
In an age where modern warfare means ever-growing distance between a nation and the implications of its actions abroad, this comes a brutal reminder of the costs of such conflict: both to those who live in and around war-zones, but also to the young men sent to fight such battles. As a representation of modern warfare on the big screen, it has no contemporary equal.