Black Hawk Down Review (2002)
Director: Ridley Scott
Writer: Ken Nolan (based on the book by Mark Bowden)
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana, William Fichtner, Sam Shepard, Ron Eldard, Ioan Gruffudd, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom
Release Date: January 18, 2002

I came to Black Hawk Down backwards from most people.

Before I ever saw the film, I played the video game. The 2003 PC game based on the film became one of my most played games for a long time, the single player running you through the actual mission and the multiplayer consuming way more hours than I care to admit. So by the time Black Hawk Down showed up on HBO or Showtime one night, I already knew the shape of what happened in Mogadishu on October 3rd and 4th, 1993. I knew the streets, I knew the call signs, I knew that what was supposed to be a thirty minute mission turned into something else entirely.

What I was not prepared for was how the film would make me feel watching it.

I bought the DVD not long after that first viewing. I own the Blu-ray now. I have seen it more times than I can count, and my opinion has never wavered once. Black Hawk Down is one of the greatest films ever made, and it might be the most realistic war movie I have ever seen. That includes Saving Private Ryan, which I love deeply and which sits just above this on my all time list. But Saving Private Ryan has a movie plot underneath it. A mission, a character arc, a destination. Black Hawk Down has none of that, and that is precisely the point. There is no plot here in the movie sense. There is only survival.

The setup is documented history. In 1993 Mogadishu, Somalia, U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators are sent on a daylight raid to capture lieutenants of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. The mission is expected to take thirty minutes. Instead two Black Hawk helicopters are shot down, soldiers are stranded in hostile territory, and what follows is fifteen hours of combat in the streets of a city that wants every single one of them dead. Eighteen Americans are killed. Seventy-three are wounded. The mission succeeds in capturing its targets and is considered a tactical victory, which is one of the more complicated facts to sit with when you know what it cost.

Ridley Scott doesn’t editorialize any of that. He doesn’t ask you to have an opinion about American foreign policy in Somalia or whether the mission was worth the cost. He puts you in the streets and he lets it happen, and the result is two and a half hours of the most sustained and visceral combat filmmaking ever put on screen. The action doesn’t let up. There is no quiet third act conversation to let you breathe. Once the helicopters go down the film becomes a survival exercise and it does not relent until the last man is out.

What separates Black Hawk Down from other action heavy war films is that Scott never loses the human beings inside the chaos. This is the great achievement of the film and it should not be taken for granted because it is extraordinarily difficult to pull off. You are tracking dozens of men across multiple locations simultaneously, men who are often dirty and bloodied and hard to distinguish from each other, and somehow you always know where you are and who you are with and what is at stake for each of them. That is a directing masterclass.

The cast is staggering in size and quality, and here is what I want to say clearly: there is not a weak performance in this film. Not one. Josh Hartnett anchors things as Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann, the young Ranger leading his chalk into the city for the first time, and Hartnett brings a quiet, determined sincerity to the role that grounds the film even as everything around him descends into chaos. Ewan McGregor as Grimes, the desk clerk who finds himself in the middle of a firefight he was never trained for, is funny and frightened and completely believable. Eric Bana as Delta operator Norm Hooten is flat out cool in the way that only certain actors can manage, projecting competence and controlled aggression without ever tipping into caricature.

Tom Sizemore, who also appears in Saving Private Ryan, is outstanding as Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight leading the ground convoy through streets that are trying to kill him from every direction. William Fichtner as Delta Sergeant First Class Jeff Sanderson is one of my favorite performances in the film, the kind of quiet authority that makes you understand immediately why men follow someone into a burning building. And then there is Sam Shepard as Major General William Garrison, watching the whole catastrophe unfold on monitors from the command post, bearing the weight of every decision and every casualty with a stillness that is more devastating than any outburst could be.

You also get early appearances from Tom Hardy and Orlando Bloom before either of them became household names, which is one of those rewatch details that hits differently every time.

The battle itself is based on Mark Bowden’s book of the same name, which Bowden originally reported as a newspaper series for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The level of research and authenticity that went into the production is evident in every frame. The real soldiers who were portrayed in the film have spoken about how accurately Scott captured the experience, and that seal of approval from the men who were actually there means more than any critical endorsement.

There is a moment fairly early in the film when the first Black Hawk goes down and you watch the faces of the men on the ground register what that means. The mission just changed. Everything just changed. And every man in that street knows it. That moment, the shift from a difficult operation to a desperate one, is when Black Hawk Down stops being a war movie and becomes something closer to a document. You are not watching a dramatization of events. You are watching what it felt like to be there.

I have never seen another film that captures the specific texture of modern urban combat the way this one does. The confusion, the noise, the split second decisions made on incomplete information, the way men die not in dramatic slow motion but suddenly and without warning, the way the survivors keep moving because stopping means dying. It is relentless and it is honest and it is exactly what a war film about a real mission with real casualties owes the men it is depicting.

Eighteen Americans did not come home from Mogadishu. Black Hawk Down makes sure you feel every one of them.

Black Hawk Down gets a five out of five: EXALTED.

If you enjoy this one, you might also like to check out my review of My First Mister or Mr. Holland’s Opus, both strong thrillers. Or click here to check out more movie reviews.

Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect forums.

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