Black Hawk Down

Released 2001
Stars Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana, William Fichtner, Ewen Bremner, Sam Shepard
Directed by Ridley Scott

When I finish watching a movie, I always ask myself what overriding message or emotion am I taking away from this movie. In the case of Black Hawk Down, it's astonishment at what an amazing force the U.S. military is. There has never been a fighting force as dominating as our military is today. Unfortunately, there are times when we get too big for our britches, and we forget that any force can be beaten. There are many factors that go into winning a battle, but this battle came down to two: firepower and numbers. Since we have the best equipped military ever assembled, we tend to rely on firepower, but that can get us into trouble. In Somalia, we had established peace for over a year with 20,000 troops in 1992, but in 1993 those troops were replaced with a small number of U.N. peacekeeping forces. It was at this point that the young Clinton administration started making mistakes, and those mistakes culminated in a desperate FUBAR that left 18 American soldiers dead on October 3, 1993.

If you take the Normandy beach footage from Saving Private Ryan and stretch it to over two hours, you'll have a good idea of what Black Hawk Down is like. It makes you feel like you're there, and it's frightening and exhilarating. This movie is like an Army commercial--even when our boys are taking casualties, they are one bad-ass bunch. I loved the fact that this movie tried to break the war movie conventions by having no character development and extraneous stories. It tried to document the events and guide a movie audience through this battle, and in those respects it was completely successful.

Summary by Bill Alward, February 24, 2002

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