One thumb up and one thumb down

Rating: 7/10 (20 March 2002)

I came out of the theater with a nauseous stomach. Being Lebanese, I had experienced war, and this movie just managed to bring back that sick feeling of fear mixed with morbid fascination.
And yet another "based on real facts" movie to honor American heroes. In 1993, 19 American soldiers perished in a raid that was ordered to bring about the defeat of the Somali militia and, consequently, the end of the hunger crisis in Somalia. Even though it was a civil war, the U.S. thought of it as "a genocide" and dispatched 123 elite soldiers there for a simple mission that turned out to be totally nightmarish for Americans AND SOMALIS ALIKE, mind you (1000 Somalis died that day). But, since Pentagon had to approve and stamp the script prior to production, I'm not surprised the movie turned to be such a (visually stunning!) propaganda. The American elite soldiers are courageous, attractive, humanitarian, compassionate, and so on. The Somalis on the other hand are portrayed as a mindless, ruthless, bloodthirsty, chaotic mob.
The movie was realistic, sometimes too realistic, i.e. too gory. In my opinion, Scott crossed the line between movie and documentary, and because of that the movie fails as a movie and the documentary fails as a documentary. This is as far as the overuse of gunpowder and bloodshed is concerned. And when I say bloodshed, I don't mean close-ups of severe wounds, but insert shots of decapitated soldiers, and of 'idle' fingers, hands, legs, and intestines all over the place.
Some of the characters were recognizable and easy to follow in the heat of the action (duh, as if Hartnett and McGregor were going to go unnoticed!). But to be honest, sometimes you just lose count of who got killed and in what circumstances and who managed to survive. And because of that, you just don't sympathize with them when they express pain and anger due to the loss of their comrades.
The clichÃ©s were inevitable: "tell my parents that I fought well", "kiss my little girls", Rangers and Deltas leaving posthumous goodbye letters with the soldiers left at the base, a soldier calling his sweetheart home and leaving her a love message on her answering machine (yep, she missed him by one second cause she was, of course, shopping). One element of surprise: usually, in movies, when a soldier is seen gazing at the photo of his sweetheart and/or children, it's a sign that he will die very tragically very soon. Well, not this time: the only soldier who is shown doing the above is incredibly lucky; he survives a plane crash, the angry armed mob, and he is the only American soldier of the Raid who to be held captive by the Somalis; yet he is eventually released. I couldn't help notice that.
I'm done with the cons of the movie, now I'll move on to the pros.
Needless to say, the action was dazzling, sensational, suspenseful, etc, etc. There was never a dull moment, but it was a tad confusing at times.

The strongest point of the movie was the superb editing. The insert shots of the Somali victims were poignant: heartfelt music, grainy photography, lonely "skinnies" (and how dare they call them that in the movie, by the way?) wandering in the ruins of their city, with their moving expressions of grief and confusion. I particularly liked the opening scene of the film, it managed to pull out the desolation, misery, and suffering of the Somalis.
The moral of this movie? It doesn't matter if the U.S. have every right to butt in other countries' civil wars, what matters is that every American soldier on foreign soil must be brought back home, dead or alive. Mostly dead, in this case.