Black Hawk Down Review

Black Hawk Down is an American war movie, which was made in 2001 and directed by Ridley Scott, which then went to direct ‘American Gangster’, which made £44 million in its opening week. He's worth £60m, he's made four of the biggest box office hits of all time Alien, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator and Hannibal and a masterpiece of modern cinema. And to think it all his career started with an ad for Hovis. Black Hawk Down was originally a book that was written by Mark Bowden but was screenplay Ken Nolan. The movie was base to tell the story famine and civil war in Somalia in 1993 and found themselves in the longest land battle involving US troops since the Vietnam war. But the movie was focus on the events of the Battle of Mogadishu, a raid of the United States effort to capture Somali warhead Mohamed Farrad Aidid.

The mission went terribly wrong, and two helicopters the Black Hawks of the title were shot down behind enemy lines. The surviving soldiers found themselves embroiled in a terrifying firefight, facing hordes of angry, armed villagers with only limited ammunition at their disposal. Meanwhile, US high command launched a daring rescue operation to bring their soldiers home.

The film won two Oscars for Best Film Editing and Best Sound at the 74th Academy Awards. The film was received positively by American film critics, but was strongly criticized by Pakistan of not crediting the work done by the Pakistani soldiers. When U.S. troops were trapped in the thickly populated Madina Bazaar area of Mogadishu, it was the Seventh Frontier Force Regiment of the Pakistan Army that reached out and extricated them. The bravery of the U.S. troops notwithstanding, we deserved equal, if not more, credit but the filmmakers depicted the incident as involving only Americans. The problem is that its subject American soldiers fighting Somali Muslims is too close to the current world situation.

Black Hawk Down doesn't so much lose sight of the political factors behind the action, as never actually notice them until after the event  making it less a film about the American experience in Somalia than a patriotic airbrushing of what was actually America's worst day of combat since Vietnam.

 

Overall Black Hawk Down is an unforgettable movies about war and at its costs. It looks fantastic, not least because it boasts helicopter scenes to rival those other big blockbuster movies at the time. While films like Saving Private Ryan show  war at its worst, they do not portray war in the modern era . I cannot imagine a better representation of a war movie, than Black Hawk Down. The cast was really good, but most of the focus was on the action and very few lines included which allow the actors to individualise their characters, the soldiers tend to blur as much as the fighting.