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 n 1993 Somalia, Africa, 18 Special Forces soldiers were
killed in an urban, guerilla-style battle in the Somalia capital of Mogadishu,
in a running battle that lasted over 15 hours and stretched into 2 days. A team of highly-trained men from
the Rangers detachment were sent to protect a small Delta Force unit charged
with capturing a Somali warlord's Lieutenants
as they gathered in a building for a high-level meeting. The mission was in
response to the warlord having massacred U.N. peacekeepers weeks earlier, but
truth be told, no one could really explain the reasons for their presence in
that war-torn city.
Black Hawk Down tells the story of that fateful day
in 1993. The movie is based on a nonfiction book of the same name by Mark
Bowden, who constructed his book as if it was a live account of the moments
leading up to the battle, and then the running gun battle itself. Bowden
achieved great insight into those fateful hours from first-hand accounts by the
Rangers themselves. As for the men of Delta Force, even if some of them had
retired, they still could not talk about that mission, or any other mission for
that matter. There is a reason why the U.S. Army refuses to confirm or deny the
existence of Delta Force to this day, after all.
Both movie and book offers an unflinching account of what transpired that day, from the
ill-conceived mission orders to the long, running gunfight that resulted,
starting at 3:00 p.m. one day and finally ending at 5:00 a.m. the next morning.
While the movie doesn't delve into great detail about the county in which hell
burned, it can be forgiven for the simple fact that Black Hawk Down was
not about the city, or the people, or even the warlord at the center of it all. Black Hawk Down
is about the men -- flesh and blood soldiers sent to fight someone else's war,
armed only with their resolve, brotherhood, and inflexible mantra of "leave
no man behind".
In
Mogadishu that day, well-trained Special Forces soldiers faced off against hundreds of the Somali
warlord's well-armed militiamen. The Somalis had a wealth of RPGs
(rocket-propelled grenade launchers) and large-caliber machineguns mounted on
moving vehicles. In other words, the Americans were hopelessly outnumbered and
outgunned. The movie makes mention of the U.S. Forces being unable to attain all
the military equipment they needed to properly execute the mission given to them
by then-President Bill Clinton, but once again, the film seems overly
uninterested in background information or politics. As one character notes, as
soon as the bullets start flying, politics go out the window.
Director Ridley Scott (Gladiator)
is proving himself to be an excellent
action director. The directing in Black Hawk Down is so crisp and
well-choreographed that you know exactly where everyone is at all times, even if
no one in the movie seems to know one street from another. As the mission winds
down, and day turns into night, the soldiers get lost, coherent communication
takes a backseat to survival, and soon the Rangers and Deltas are leaving men
behind everywhere without realizing it.
Scott's sure hand is
quite an accomplishment, since once the bullets start flying one Mogadishu
street starts to look like another. And yet, by cutting to various parts of the
battle and intercutting them with a surveillance helicopter monitoring the whole
thing in the sky and the command center back at the Army base, Scott keeps us
firmly planted in the action.
And speaking of action, the gunfight in Black Hawk Down
is extremely brutal and the way
bullets keep bouncing off walls around the soldiers seems almost surreal. This
is urban fighting, house-to-house, street-to-street -- all executed with perfect
timing and horrific pale colors. In one particularly
gruesome scene, an RPG rocket pierces a moving truck's door and sticks,
unexploded, into the side of an American soldier. Another character loses his
entire lower body after being blown clear of a truck, and another gets a finger
literally shot off as he's racing for cover.
It's impossible and unnecessary to single out
any member of Black Hawk Down's cast, since they're interchangeable. Even
if you remembered the names of the actors, or knows that Ewan McGregor was
playing an American and that Tom Sizemore (Saving
Private Ryan) was once again playing a hardened
soldier, it still doesn't matter. The movie isn't about individual heroism or
even about personalities. The Special Forces' creed is "Leave no
man behind," and through thick and thin, smoke and grenade craters, bullets
and missiles, the Rangers and the Deltas followed that creed to the bitter,
bloody end in 1993.
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