Action/war drama based on the best-selling book detailing a near-disastrous mission in Somalia on October 3, 1993 where nearly 100 U.S. Army Rangers, commanded by Capt. Mike Steele, were dropped by helicopter deep into the capital city of Mogadishu to capture two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord which lead to a large and drawn-out firefight between the Rangers and hundreds of Somali gunmen which led to the destruction of two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu, and the heroic efforts by various Rangers to get to them, centering on Sgt. Eversmann commanding one Ranger unit, named Chalk Four, pinned down by the street fighting, to Warrant Officer Durant who was only survivor of the second black hawk crash site and whom was captured, to Lt. Col. McKnight who leads a rescue convoy for the Rangers only to get lost within the hostile city, to Lt. Perino leading Rangers to the first black hawk crash site, to Staff Sgt. Yurek who leads his decimated Ranger group Chalk Two through gunfire to safety, to many others involved who were either killed or survived.

Beginning with a quote from T.S. Elliott--"All our ignorance brings us closer to death"--the hope that Black Hawk Down will offer an intelligent war film to a world after September 11, 2001 is high. Based on a true story which led to a bestselling book, the film focuses on the 1993 American mission to Somalia which went terribly wrong. To a certain extent it succeeds with its opening promise, but all too quickly falls under the spell of American national pride--possibly the reason why the film was brought forward from its original release date. One might hope that with a British director, Ridley Scott, and a high percentage of British and Australian actors on board, Black Hawk Down would present an outsider's view on the American politics of war, but produced by the team who brought us Pearl Harbor the end result is a traditional American-Heroic war movie, relying more on special effects, gore and gun battles than character, emotion and politics.In its favour Black Hawk Down does make an attempt to represent the views of the Somalian people. In one of its strongest scenes, a high-powered Somalian gun seller states; "This is our war not yours", but by the end of the film it's clear that this is merely a token gesture towards a non-Western perspective on the conflict. Many American soldiers lost their lives during this battle, and this movie is a fine tribute to these amazing men in one of the first big-budget films to expose modern Warfare. As far as top billing goes, Josh Hartnett and Ewan McGregor hold no greater role than the rest of the cast. The standout performance comes from Ewen Bremner, who offers an unexpectedly comic turn against the bleak backdrop; but otherwise the limited character development highlights one of the film's main issues--that although these men are fighting for their country, when on the battlefield they stand together and no man is more important than any other (unless you're on the wrong side!). --Nikki Disney

Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down" tells the story of a U.S. military raid that went disastrously wrong when optimistic plans ran into unexpected resistance. In Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993, 18 Americans lost their lives, 70 more were wounded, and within days President Bill Clinton pulled out troops that were on a humanitarian mission. By then some 300,000 Somalis had died of starvation, and the U.S. purpose was to help deliver U.N. food shipments. Somali warlords were more interested in protecting their turf than feeding their people--an early warning of the kind of zeal that led to Sept. 11. The movie is single-minded in its purpose. It wants to record as accurately as possible what it was like to be one of the soldiers under fire on that mission. Hour by hour, step by step, it reconstructs the chain of events. The plan was to stage a surprise raid by helicopter-borne troops, joined by ground forces, on a meeting of a warlord's top lieutenants. This was thought to be such a straightforward task that some soldiers left behind their canteens and night-vision gear, expecting to be back at the base in a few hours. It didn't work out that way. What happened was enemy rockets brought down two of the helicopters. The warlord's troops gathered quickly and surrounded the U.S. positions. Roadblocks and poor communications prevented a support convoy from approaching. And a grim firefight became a war of attrition. The Americans gave better than they got, but from any point of view, the U.S. raid was a catastrophe. The movie's implied message is that America on that day lost its resolve to risk American lives in distant and obscure struggles, and that mindset weakened our stance against terrorism. The engagement itself seems to have degenerated into bloody chaos. Ridley Scott's achievement is to render it comprehensible to the audience. We understand, more or less, where the Americans are, and why, and what their situation is. We follow several leading characters, but this is not a star-driven project and doesn't depend on dialogue or personalities. It is about the logistics of that day in October, and how training did help those expert fighters (Army Rangers and Delta Force) to defend themselves as well as possible when all the plans went wrong and they were left hanging out to dry. Scott's visual strategy takes advantage of the presence on that day of aerial spotter planes with infra-red sensors that could detect the movements of the humans below. As the battle unfolds, Shepherd and his fellow officers can follow it on screens, but are powerless to use this information. It is a useful tool for keeping the audience informed. (In my original review, I questioned the possibility of these eye-in-the-sky shots; countless readers told me they were based on fact and are described in Mark Bowden's book about the battle.) His longest day begins with a briefing by Maj. Gen. William F. Garrison (Sam Shepard), who explains how intelligence has discovered the time and location of a meeting by lieutenants of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. A taxi with a black cross on its roof will park next to the building to guide the airborne troops, who will drop down on ropes, be joined by ground forces, secure the building, and take prisoners. The problem with this plan, as Garrison discovers in steadily more discouraging feedback, is that the opposition is better armed, better positioned, and able to call on quick reinforcements. We follow several stories. A man falls from a helicopter and is injured when he misses his descent rope. A pilot is taken prisoner. Desperate skirmishes unfold in streets and rubble as darkness falls. The Americans are short on ammo and water, facing enemies not particularly shy about exposing themselves to danger. "Black Hawk Down" doesn't have heroic foreground figures like most war movies. The leading characters are played by stars who will be familiar to frequent moviegoers but may be hard to tell apart for others. They include Josh Hartnett, much more convincing here than in "Pearl Harbor," as a staff sergeant in command of one of the raiding teams; Ewan McGregor as a Ranger specialist whose specialties are paperwork and coffee-making until he is pressed into service; Tom Sizemore as a veteran who provides steady counsel for younger troops, and William Fichtner as a fighter who seems to have internalized every shred of training, and embodies it instinctively. The cinematography by Slawomir Idziak avoids the bright colors of upbeat combat movies, and its drab, dusty tones gradually drain of light as night falls. The later scenes of the movie feel chilly and forlorn; the surrounded troops are alone and endangered in the night. The screenplay by Ken Nolan and Steve Zaillian, working from a book by Mark Bowden, understands the material and tells it so clearly and efficiently that we are involved not only in the experience of the day but also in its strategies and unfolding realities. Films like this are more useful than gung-ho capers like "Behind Enemy Lines." They help audiences understand and sympathize with the actual experiences of combat troops, instead of trivializing them into entertainments. Although the American mission in Somalia was humanitarian, the movie avoids speechmaking and sloganeering, and at one point, discussing why soldiers risk their lives in situations like this, a veteran says, "It's about the men next to you. That's all it is." --ROGER EBERT

"Black Hawk Down" is more than simply, as the opening title says, "Based on an Actual Event." As much as a movie ever has, it puts you completely inside that event, brilliantly taking you where most people, even those who were actually there, wouldn't want to be. For "realism" is a mild word for the way director Ridley Scott sweepingly re-creates 1993's fierce 15-hour battle between besieged U.S. troops and Somali fighters on the streets of Mogadishu in which 18 Americans were killed and 73 badly injured, the biggest totals since Vietnam. His is a triumph of pure filmmaking, a pitiless, unrelenting, no-excuses war movie so thoroughly convincing it's frequently difficult to believe it is a staged re-creation. "Black Hawk Down" can be tough to sit through, but the fluidity and skill involved are so impressive it's an exhilarating experience as well. Scott's film is based on and takes its spirit from Mark Bowden's fiendishly detailed, un-put-downable nonfiction book of the same name. Cinematic in its vividness and narrative drive, Bowden's work was embraced by military and civilian readers for its ability to penetrate the psychological states of its fighters as they struggled to survive in a locale as strange and dislocating to them as the canals of Mars. To make this kind of a film, to persuasively re-create other worlds, has been Scott's strength as a director from his 1978 "The Duelists" debut through "Alien," "Blade Runner" and last year's Oscar-winning "Gladiator." Few directors have Scott's exceptional visual sense, his decades of experience and his ability to orchestrate large-scale action, all of which are critical to "Black Hawk's" success. As faithfully adapted from Bowden's book by Ken Nolan, "Black Hawk" also plays to Scott's strength by keeping dialogue to a minimum. It's a cleanly told story, with a noticeable absence of movie frippery, a narrative whose stalwart matter-of-factness allows it to respect the professionalism of the combatants while being unflinching about mistakes made. "It seemed to me that the film had to be an anatomy of the military process," is how the director describes things. "That's why there's no fat in the picture." Though the result is much closer to "Battle of Algiers" than "Pearl Harbor," this film is also an unlikely triumph for producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose usual m.o. is so different that "Black Hawk" for the most part seems an anti-Bruckheimer film. Yet the producer understood what was called for here, and he put his extensive experience to use in getting the project what it needed, including cajoling the Army into providing Rangers and Black Hawk helicopters and persuading the king of Morocco, where the film was shot, to allow these troops onto his soil. The usual device of type on screen briefly sets up "Black Hawk's" back story. Famine, starvation and brutal clan warfare had combined to bring a U.N. peacekeeping mission to Somalia, but the country's top warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, is impervious to its blandishments. To put pressure on Aidid, the U.S. military, here personified by Maj. Gen. William F. Garrison (Sam Shepard at his laconic best), decided to kidnap the people closest to him. On Oct. 3, 1993, a raid was set to extract the warlord's top lieutenants from an area called Bakara Market. "It's an entirely hostile district," the general tells his men, adding, in what proved to be very much of an understatement, "don't underestimate their capabilities." Going in was a combination of the Army's top units, the Rangers and the Delta Force, troops that turned out to be rivals. Though very much of an elite group themselves, the Rangers were younger and less experienced than the intimidating "D-boys," who wore their hair long, taped their blood type to their boots before going into combat and in general made their own rules. It's a mark of the kind of 40-speaking-part ensemble film "Black Hawk Down" is that though there are several recognizable faces-Josh Hartnett as an idealist, Ewan McGregor as a desk jockey eager for combat, Tom Sizemore as the leader of a vehicle convoy, "Chopper's" Eric Bana and William Fichtner as Delta aces, "The Patriot" villain Jason Isaacs as a Ranger captain-no one person stands out from the excellent group. Also, though the book provided extensive back stories for many individuals, the film wisely does without them. There wouldn't be room and, in the context here, they're not necessary. The operation, scheduled for an hour or less, starts to unravel almost immediately. An accident leads to delays that allow the Somali fighters to organize and attack. Suddenly, the American troops are hip-deep in a nightmare in which a large, well-armed army camouflaged in street clothes materializes out of nowhere and envelops everyone in what Bowden says veterans call "the fog of war." Making things even more chaotic is the Ranger determination, stated in a creed they take seriously, never to "leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." Once the fighting begins, it's difficult to tell the soldiers apart, which is why Scott broke with actuality and mandated names on Ranger helmets. (The D-boys are identifiable by the small black helmets they wear.) But the scene and not the individual is the focus here, and as edited by "JFK" Oscar winner Pietro Scalia and shot by Slawomir Idziak, the confusion seems part of the point. Idziak, best known for working with Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, seems an unlikely choice here, but using an average of six to eight cameras for each setup, he does a mind-bending job counterfeiting reality. Though it is undeniably brutal, with several unnervingly bloody sequences, the violence in "Black Hawk Down" is the opposite of exploitative. And the film also takes time to at least nod toward some more complex questions, from exploring whether we should have been in Somalia in the first place to examining the complicated nature of what is conventionally described as heroism. With its delineation of how well American troops did under killingly adverse conditions, "Black Hawk Down" shows why the military elements involved in the battle consider it a victory. Yet, paradoxically, the tone of this film is anything but triumphal. The sadness of so many deaths, including an estimated 500 Somalis, that seem so pointless is strongly felt. A line from Plato that opens the film is especially haunting by the close. "Only the dead," he wrote, "have seen the end of war." --KENNETH TURAN

The fiasco of America's imperial mini-adventure in Somalia in 1993 is turned by Ridley Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer into two-and-a-quarter hours of directionless, cacophonous, kick-ass operatics in which the overridingly big deal is that America got all its boys out. It's a post-modern Zulu Dawn - with higher cheekbones. The scenario is that the United States is gruffly attempting to shoulder the white man's peacekeeping burden in Mogadishu, where fanatical warlord Mohamed Farrah Aideed is terrorising the populace. The mission is to abduct two of his aides, a plan to be carried out by the Rangers and Delta Force, an elite group composed of only the very best-looking guys: Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Ewan McGregor. Collectively, they're a sort of Desert Storm model agency, but there's plausible roughage provided by chunky Tom Sizemore - without whom no Hollywood war movie may legally proceed - and lovably ugly Ewen Bremner. But when one of the Black Hawk choppers is hit, the whole thing goes irreparably pear-shaped and the only honour to be salvaged is in some kind of orderly retreat. Ridley Scott provides us with a pure war movie, remarkable in some ways for the severity - even asceticism - of its utter concentration on deafening and relentless action. There is no backstory for anyone. There is an eerie absence of political context, even when one US soldier is taken hostage by the militia, which in David O Russell's Three Kings was the cue for a brilliantly ironic, illuminating exchange. Nothing like that here. There is silence on the subject of what religion the locals are. All we get from opening to closing credits is guns and ammo and shooting and shouting. It has a bit of sentimental 'Nam-style paraphernalia: Hendrix's Voodoo Chile as the choppers take off, famine-hit civilians called "skinnies" (nice touch, guys) and newcomers told to call the capital "Mog" or "The Mog". But even that point of reference disappears, and the very strategy on the ground is obscure. At what point exactly does Sam Shepard's grizzled general decide to abandon the plan and hightail it out of there? And whose fault is it that the US military was humiliated by this undisciplined rabble? This movie has no idea, and no interest. As one soldier says toughly: "It's about the man next to you; that's all there is." Like Governor Bill Clinton in 1990, Ridley Scott supports the army, not necessarily the war. But this is very much a movie for post-September 11 America, notionally chastened yet inexhaustibly gung-ho in its body language. Cinematographer Slawomir Idziak has given Scott a great-looking movie, right enough; there's impeccable location work and bang-up action sequences; in fact the whole film is a 135- minute action sequence. So it's never boring exactly - but never all that exciting either. In Gladiator and Hannibal, Ridley Scott gave us shrewd, witty entertainments; this is macho obtuse posturing, puffed up with ersatz valour. --Peter Bradshaw

Ridley Scott is the greatest physical director at work today. His first film, The Duellists, was a blood-drenched tale of the Napoleonic Wars, and if you can name a more gut-wrenching scene from a serious movie than John Hurt's abdominal troubles in Alien don't tell me about it. His new film, Black Hawk Down, is one of the most convincing, realistic combat movies I've ever seen, a film presenting a confused event with clarity and involving us as if we were there in the thick of the fray. More importantly, unlike all the films that followed the Vietnam War, it isn't made by people with a generalised contempt for soldiers and soldiering who believe that the military brass is staffed exclusively by mad General Turgidsons and napalm-sniffing Colonel Kilgores. Scott was reared in a military background, which he has not come to despise, and is probably more sympathetic to professional soldiers than any director since John Ford. Black Hawk Down takes place in 24 hours in Somalia in October 1993 and closely adheres to the facts of a military disaster comparable in impact and heroism, if not in scale, to Balaclava or Dunkirk. From a secure airport base outside of the city, the US component of a United Nations force decides to send a party of Rangers and Delta commandos into a hostile section of Mogadishu to kidnap two lieutenants of the notorious warlord Mohammad Aidid, a man robbing his own people of Red Cross aid and responsible for several hundred thousands deaths. We see the troops prepare for the attack in the morning, then go off on what proves a doomed mission, the Americans depending on an unreliable informer and the enemy having received advance intelligence. After two Black Hawk helicopters are brought down in the streets, a desperate battle for survival ensues, and the commanding general (Sam Shepard) can only stand by looking at monitor screens as a massive, well- armed and semi-suicidal militia surround his troops. They're following their code of never leaving a comrade or his corpse on the battlefield and the final death toll of 18 dead and 73 injured (two of them stripped and dragged through the streets, though we're spared the full sight of this) is largely due to this sense of duty. In one macabre shot a Ranger picks up a buddy's severed hand, a watch still ticking on the wrist, and puts it in a pouch. The troops fight from block to block under constant fire, often losing contact with each other and rarely getting the air support they need. Their object is just a few miles away, the safe haven of a stadium manned by Pakistani troops who well know the horrors of losing an engagement with the militia. We get to know the Americans as functioning soldiers not as types and they work as a close-knit team without having lost their individuality. There's carnage aplenty, but no false heroics or vainglorious sacrifices, and no lyrical violence. The only slow-motion shots come towards the end when the tired troops make their final dawn run to the stadium. Black Hawk Down isn't about citizen soldiers fighting a manifestly 'good war' as the GIs were in Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. It's about professionals, volunteers, people serving and protecting their country in times of so-called peace. Their motivations vary but in the final analysis they are held together by comradeship, self-respect, and the proud sense of belonging to an elite force. The spirit of Rudyard Kipling lies behind it along with Kipling's cruelty and ambivalent attitude towards the enemy - over 500 militiamen were killed in the action, though the movie does give telling lines to the three sophisticated Somali leaders with speaking parts. This is the Kipling of Barrack Room Ballads who wrote 'For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"/ But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.'. Or of special current relevance: 'When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,/ And the women come out to cut up what remains, /Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/ An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.' --Philip French

Nominated: AFI Cinematographer of the Year; AFI Director of the Year; AFI Editor of the Year; AFI Movie of the Year; AFI Production Designer of the Year.

Won: Best Editing; Best Sound.
Nominated: Best Cinematography; Best Director.

Nominated: Best Action/Adventure/Thriller Film

Won: Best Edited Feature Film - Dramatic

Nominated: Best Cinematography; Best Editing; Best Sound

Nominated: Outstanding Sound Mixing for Motion Pictures

Nominated: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures

Nominated: Best Action Sequence; Best Movie

Won: Best Sound Editing - Effects and Foley, Domestic Feature Film
Nominated: Best Sound Editing - Dialogue and A.D.R., Domestic Feature Film

Nominated: Best Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published