The battle of Mogadishu in 1993 gets a vivid big-screen treatment from a great filmmaker at the height of his technical proficiency and creative powers. Ridley Scott’s BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001) is a true-story horror of a military operation going tragically wrong. It shows what happens when professional soldiers confront a warlord’s militia forces.
When any thorough tactical advantage is lost, American squads are outflanked and besieged by Somali belligerence and ferocity. Gritty and messy scenes of airborne troops are quite unnervingly mixed with a more traditional sort of gung-ho US action, epitomised by Tom Sizemore as the battalion commander. He strides purposefully through the mayhem of sundry guerrilla strikes in urban slums, to deliver a fearless portrait of unflinchingly single-minded heroism, staring into the face of sudden death and wanton destruction. Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana, and Sam Shepard are excellent in their supporting roles.
Centred on a pair of helicopter crashes, and the desperate bravery of rescuers, it’s one of the greatest war movies ever made. John Moore’s similarly themed Behind Enemy Lines (2001), about a US jet pilot shot down in the Bosnian war, fails to match its grim intensity.
Rotary Action archive page about Black Hawk Down.
