A film about friendship, bravery, and honor.

Rating: 10/10 (20 January 2002)

"Black Hawk Down" is one of the few movie screenings I've ever attended where no one talked during the 2-Â½ hour running time. No one left their seats until the movie ended. Not one. One of the most powerful and realistic films I've ever seen. It tells us and shows us exactly how it is. This is a film about real people in the real world who were placed in harm's way solely because of political expediency. Many of who really died.
Ridley Scott masterfully directs in such a way that he takes the most chaotic and confusing of situations and makes it clear to the movie viewer what exactly is happening and does so on a multi-dimensional level.
The screenplay allows the characters to explain what war on the battlefield is about. Before the raid one battle tested veteran says to a soldier who is untested: "When that first bullet goes by your head, politics goes out the window." Later, when it is all over he explains that when he goes back home and people ask him what happen, he won't even try to explain, because they would never understand. In battle it is always about the same thing he says, "just you and the guy next to you."
Every politician should be made to watch this film to see the human toll from the decisions they make. "Black Hawk Down" brilliantly demonstrates that war is not a military act but a political one, and that there really is a difference between dying for something and dying for nothing. Every one of the soldiers who were killed died for their friends. None of them died for nothing.