If you want to be entertained, stay home and rent 'Shrek'

Rating: Null/10 (21 January 2002)

Black Hawk Down is based (and as far as I can tell, very faithfully) on Mark Bowden's retelling of the real events that happened in Somalia in 1993.
Black Hawk Down isn't fictionalized Hollywood hero-worship, like we've had forced on us in Saving Private Ryan, or Pearl Harbor. Black Hawk Down is a 144 minute reminder of why real war isn't entertaining, but frightening, bloody, and terrible. This movie hopes to remind us that when we send our troops off to foreign lands to do the work diplomacy can't do, that some of those troops are going to die. Most of the guys who died in Somalia where just 19 year old kids. Hopefully, Black Hawk Down reminds us of the seriousness of making the decision to send our troops into harms way, and the possible, if lately forgotten, consequences of that decision.
When I read Mark Bowden's book, I literally had to put it down several times because I was just emotionally overwhelmed by it. It should be required reading for high school seniors, in my opinion.
If you hoped to find Black Hawk Down 'entertaining', I feel sorry for you. From reading the book, I had no such expectation. I actually had to sit in the theater after the film ended, until the clean up crew came through, thinking about what I had just seen.
The whole point of not getting the back story to the characters in Black Hawk Down is that you don't need to have them. The characters could have been anyone, your next door neighbor, the kid down the street. The fact that they were scared, overwhelmed, very real human beings stuck in a place where a whole city was trying to kill them is what makes the slice of the characters lives we are shown during the movie so compelling.
If you didn't get the power of the film, I'll tell you how to truly experience it. If you unfortunately don't feel like reading Bowden's book, watch the movie again, but pay close attention to the names written on the front of the characters' helmets. I was told that this was one of the few technical departures from real life, as real Rangers don't write their names on their helmets like that.
To really get this film, watch, and remember, the names on the helmets of the characters that die. Because, unlike the fictionalized characters in Saving Private Ryan, for example, all the characters in Black Hawk Down are, or sadly were, very real Americans. They are not merely 'representations' of real characters, written with fictional license. What the characters do in the movie is what the real guys did in real life. Real Americans, who died in a dirty nowhere part of Africa, married guys who died worrying about what was going to happen to their kids and wives back home, young guys who died whose biggest worry was that their parents were proud of them. That stuff isn't Hollywood cliche, but taken from interviews with the survivors of what really happened.
This is, in my opinion, one of the most amazing uses of film I've ever seen. Ridley Scott has easily solidified his spot as one of the world's premier motion picture directors. I hesitate to even call Black Hawk Down a 'war movie', because that trivializes what it is really about. It isn't about heroes. It doesn't try to remind you that 'war is hell', and is something glorious that an older generation did once. And it is not 'anti-war' either.
Black Hawk Down hopefully will remind some of us who have forgotten about the terrible seriousness of sending our soldiers to fight and possibly die in foreign lands. It doesn't distract us with comment on the politics behind the fighting, or confuse us with back story, or try to soften things with a pointless love story. We don't have to listen to Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks telling us what a glorious bunch of people our grandfathers were for fighting a terrible war that is, sadly, inaccessible ancient history for most of today's youth.
Because in war, real people die in terrible, real ways, and the sanitized image of war we get from the popular media lately tends to make us forget the real human costs of combat, on both sides....