Best Film to Date About Modern Urban Warfare

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 2005)

'Black Hawk Down' plays a little fast and loose with the facts, but it's presentation of the events of the Mogadishu Battle in '94 and depiction of the sensation of being in the middle of a tense urban battle are as close to the real thing as any major movie has thus far come.
Ridley Scott's rendering of the political events leading up to the battle is a bit bothersome in its brevity, but it becomes clear enough once the action gets going that this movie exists primarily for the purpose of reenacting the battle. We are offered the standard Hollywood tropes, especially in the form of Josh Hartnett's character, Eversmann, who is saddled with the role of resident idealist, and the character of Norm 'Hoot' Gibson (Eric Bana) as the king-daddy bad-ass, but the action is very faithful to the accounts of the battle described in Mark Bowden's superb book, and the development of the various characters (some real, some--like Hoot--composite) lends a strong sense of the stakes for these young men. The film is memorable for being one of the first authorized and realistic depictions of the work of Delta Force, the secretive elite branch of the Special Forces, and for reconstructing in a palpable manner the challenges of urban warfare with modern weaponry.
This film probably doesn't deserve to be ranked alongside the great war films such as 'Apocalypse Now,' 'Full Metal Jacket,' or 'Saving Private Ryan,' largely because the events it describes are not part of a larger, more coherent war narrative. Task Force Ranger was a relatively isolated peace-keeping operation that would likely have failed to gain the attention of the international media were it not for the footage of the corpses of dead US Army personnel being dragged through the streets by angry Somalis (later that same year, the US Army invaded Haiti after a military coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and hardly anyone noticed). Nevertheless, 'Black Hawk Down' is a breathtaking, moving experience for its portrayal of the realities of warfare in our contemporary age.