no politics please, this is a movie

Rating: 2/10 (10 June 2002)

This is a movie, made for entertainment value, and that is all I care to review here.
I enjoyed Black Hawk Down, but also was disappointed - for the same reason that the movie is fresh and atypical, it is also cold and uninvolving. In avoiding the usual archetypal-stereotypical characters always found in war movies,i.e., the valiant sargeant, the newbie lieutenant, the Bronx-Brooklyn-Joisey guy, the Okie from Muskogee, the maniac killer, the sensitive soul, etc. etc. ad nauseum, we wind up with ultimately faceless and nameless figures who congeal into an indistinguishable mass of helmets and guns.
Despite the appearance of individual story-lines, I had trouble figuring out who I was watching after a while; there were characters introduced in the beginning who never seemed to appear again, and there were characters who did pop up whose fates seemed to be left hanging. By the end, I was wondering if I had even seen the character I thought I was watching in almost any given battle scene.
The movie is very well done nonetheless, if all you want to see is a thrilling shoot-em-up. In that respect, Black Hawk Down is great entertainment. However, if you are looking for symbolic characterizations and political commentary, go rent a movie like Platoon.