clarifications regarding the film's accuracy and brief review

Rating: 10/10 (10 April 2008)

While Scott has put a lot of work into creating an aesthetically very 'realistic' film (although this particular style of special effects realism is worth more time)- tight camera work, incredibly fast cutting, and a meticulously crafted audiotrack - it would be misleading to view this film as historically accurate because of the blaring inaccuracies I list below. Number 4 is probably most important for a lot of people: departing from the book on which the film was based, in which Bowden wrote that large numbers of civilians were massacred by the American forces, the film goes out of its way to show troops only killing civilians when they pick up weapons. It does make a legitimate effort though - and Scott worked closely with top military brass to authenticate his film. But there is a range of inaccuracies that, while nice to know about, may not be essential to the film, which is far more enjoyable if we abandon the presumption that this is what it was really like (if we expect this going in then the film plays like a commercial for the Special Forces).
Here are the range of inaccuracies I mentioned, from most benign to the more troubling:
1) There are details that are put in to help orient viewers and tell who is who - eg. Rangers don't actually have their names written on their helmets - and these adjustments are harmless. 2) There are more involved changes designed to orient us in the genre - for instance, 'Hoot' (Bana's character) is an entirely fictional character modeled after various cowboy heroes in Westerns. This is interesting because he is the character I at least identified with most strongly as the 'most bad ass;' he is also the mouthpiece for the most explicitly propaganda-like messages in the film. 3) Also, more generally, the historical context is elided so that the mythological tone of the film can be amplified: the history of Somalia we get is purely designed to further put us in the world the first two quotes set up for us: -Based on Real Events, and -Plato: Only the dead have seen the end of war. From here the issue of (in)accuracy becomes clearest: Scott is more concerned with mythologizing the Mogadishu disaster, that is presenting Mogadishu as a philosophical problem and not merely a political one. He thus presents Mogadishu as a place where war is simply a way of life with no ultimate explanation.
4) as mark bowden's book black hawk down details, the American forces were not successful at distinguishing somali militants from non-combatants and ended up killing large numbers of unarmed people.
This is not to say that the film is merely a piece of propaganda. Thinking this way is usually an excuse to either dismiss the enjoyment one legitimately gets watching the film (and this is a deeply satisfying film for action-movie fans) or to avoid thinking about it altogether. The film is important in many respects, Mike Davis, an urban theorist, argues that it is the Blade Runner of the 21st century, and if you think about how powerful the image of militarized slums has gotten in our public imagination, it is not hard to see what he's getting at.