BlackHawk Down: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly (some spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (4 February 2002)

First of all, I would like to point out something to all those who have said that the only reason Black Hawk Down was made was to exploit the resurgence of patriotism in America, and that is this: Movies take a hell of a lot longer than four months to create. Black Hawk Down was already in development long before Sept. 11. If you want to rail against the exploitation of patriotism, get your facts straight first.
That said, I thought the movie was well-executed, walking the line between action and drama reasonably well. There were only a few moments that I felt really sacrificed the tragic reality of the events for Hollywood action: one was the "play-deaf-jokes-for-laughs" treatment of Ewen Bremner's character, the other was the killing of the Big Bad Somali Militiaman with the hijacked cannon. The first incident takes a character based on a real-life Army Ranger fighting for his life while his friends and squad-mates die and treating him as an excuse for a cheap laugh, something I think is in very questionable taste. The other instance was just too much of a Bruckheimer moment for such a serious film. You could almost hear Nicolas Cage yelling "How do ya like how that s**t works?" (Watch "The Rock" if you don't understand)
The movie's strong points, though, more than made up for these occasional slips into Hollywood cliche. The scene of the two Delta Force snipers trying in vain to hold off the militia was one of the most powerful scenes in the film, made all the more tragic by the knowledge of their eventual fate. For those who don't know, they were among the men whose bodies were dragged through the streets for everyone to watch on CNN.
Overall, though the film was powerful in its depiction of close-quarters urban warfare, I left the theater feeling strangely empty. These men were put into a poorly-planned mission with inadequate backup, and forced into a firefight against a far-larger army. The fact that any of them survived is truly amazing. But the movie just left me feeling unfulfilled. I think this is largely due to the film's ending. For a movie whose tagline is "Leave No Man Behind," I question the decision to leave the story of the last pilot's release as two lines of text just before the credits. I wanted to see him coming home, not just read about it as the credits begin to roll.
As a final word, one of the most compelling things I have read or heard about the actual events is the reaction of those who survived. Most have no anger about the mission, or of being put into that situation. The anger comes over the final outcome: the withdrawal of troops from Somalia. The overwhelming question on the minds of the survivors is, "Why was the U.S. involved, if we weren't willing to stay until our mission was achieved?" By pulling out of Somalia, we made the deaths of those soldiers meaningless. They died for nothing, because we didn't stay until the goals of the military intervention were achieved. After we left, Somalis were still starving, Aidid was still in power, and the clan wars were still raging on. The only difference was that thousands more people were dead.

You can debate about whether we should have been there in the first place, but once we committed to battle, we owed it to those soldiers to make their sacrifices achieve something. And that is an aspect of the story I wish had been stressed more in the film.