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Summary: It's about the guy next to you........
Review: Blackhawk Down is an extraordinary film about the chaos, violence, incredible fear, unexpected bravery, and the bonds between men forged in combat. It brings modern combat to us in ways we have never seen, heard and felt before. It tells its tale pretty honestly and with fidelity to the facts (within a dramatic presentation).I read the book, and I frankly thought it would be unfilmable, or a botched job at best. While there were heroics there was no one hero, while there was courage, there were screwups and failures of will and the whole battle was a chaotic mess. Well Ridley Scott & company have managed to convey all that while managing the incredible task of keeping the film comprehensible. Although the battle is shown in all its fear & confusion-inducing chaos, the viewer can follow the action and not get lost in it. A major accomplishment. No fan of Gladiator, I thought Ridley deserved the Oscar for this incredible piece of work. An ensemble piece, befitting the book's view of the combatants as parts of the group, sometimes isolated and fighting alone, but part of a whole team, we note that although personality must be submerged to the group they are still individuals, with often contradictory mixtures of fear & courage. We also see the extraordinary Delta Force guys that we know so little about. These men and their disdain for the routine military rites, ranks & disciplines are discussed at length in the book, and they are something else! I won't address anyone's complaints about the treatment of the Somalis. Read the book. The film, by necessity, does many things in thumbnail sketches...but it does them extremely well. We see the marketplace at the outset of the film, stalls of hanging clothing beside belts of automatic weapons ammo, and it tells us what a dangerous place Mogadishu was in an instant. That our boys were cocky and arrogant and absolutely uninstructed in who and what they were dealing with before they literally got "dropped into it" is made abundantly clear. It's how they handled themselves and how they fought their way out of it after that this story is about. And it is told damn well in book & movieP>What the movie is about is what the Delta guy says at the end. It isn't about the excitement of warfare, it's about the guy next to you. It's about the sacrifice and courage and bond of men under extreme fear and stress, fighting for their lives against overwhelming odds. And, its a true story. Worked for me.
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Summary: black hawk down
Review: This movie has got to be the best I have seen to date. I have the utmost respect for the guys that actually did that in real life. A very realistic movie , will definitely get it when it comes out on dvd. A must for any military action film fan!!!!
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Summary: WAIT!!!!! DO NOT BUY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: My advice to everyone who is planning on buying the DVD release of Black Hawk Down. Wait a little while longer. This release has next to NO extra features on it. Also, Ridley Scott is planning on puting together a special edition version of it-packed with loads of extras that will be a fine edition to this awesome film. Just be patient and it will pay off.
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Summary: Misunderstood War Movie
Review: Alot of viewers of Black Hawk Down claim that it lacked substance, plot structure, and character development. I guess in a way you could say that. Then again, if you want to see another war love story i'd recommend Pearl Harbor or something along those lines, but if you want a realistic war movie? Hawk emphasizes more on the important realism of the events in Mogadishu than anything else. This was a war movie for war movies. And the characters were brilliant, acting as real soldiers would in this scenario. Overall, Hawk was a good war movie, but still not the best.
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Summary: To Eager to Please the American People
Review: This was a movie that was created to be the most PC and pleasing movie of the year. THe characters were unbeleivible, with stupid antics to make shots at jokes during the movies. THe main character was the perfect boyscout who loved all races and was there to save lives, i dont doubt that the men and women in service do this but he was just too much the perfect human being without any faults. The movie was also too repetitive, i would of loved to pay 1/4 the price and have seen 30 mins, but instead it seemed they took thirty minutes of footage and put it on a loop.
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Summary: Woah.
Review: I was skeptical going into "Black Hawk Down". After all, just look at the credits. Ridley Scott is the director, and he hasn't had a good film for ages (no, not even "Gladiator".) Jerry Bruckheimer has bad enough judgment to produce cash cows like "Pearl Harbor" (and that's a train wreck big enough to destroy anyone's career.) The cast, while featuring some good actors, is not exactly stellar. I was convinced I wouldn't see the film after seeing the trailer (the dialogue struck me as incredibly poor). But somehow I found myself seeing it, and boy was I surprised when I discovered the most riveting, unsettling war film since "Saving Private Ryan". The time is October 3, 1993; the place is Somalia. 120 American soldiers were on a mission to capture lieutenants of warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. "Black Hawk Down" is a portrait of how what was supposed to be a half-hour mission turned into a grueling, 18 hour ordeal that led hundreds of Somalis and 18 Americans to their deaths. "Black Hawk Down" is amazing in how it puts you right in a soldiers shoes. It doesn't speechify or go heavy on irony. The event is depicted through actions, not words, and the result is stunning. We see each little decision that was made, each step that went wrong, and how it all lead to tragedy. Watching "Black Hawk Down", I felt like I was actually a soldier in combat, and it was terrifying. It is important to remember that this film isn't about the politics and the reasoning behind the mission, but about the experience. There is no trying to justify the reasons why things happened like they did. At times, it seems the screenplay (written by Ken Nolan and Steven Zaillian) wants to go that route, but Ridley Scott won't let it. We don't get to know the characters, but the idea of the film is that you are one of them. "Black Hawk Down" differs from films like "Saving Private Ryan" in that it isn't so much about the soldiers lives and their legacies, but more the terror of being shoved into circumstances beyond your control. Scott has regained his title of one of the most visually brilliant directors around, after losing it with films like "Gladiator" and "Hannibal". Anyone can make a film gory, few people are clear-headed enough to make it realistic. "Enemy at the Gates", for example, gives us a good look at Russian soldiers being mowed down by German machine guns, but the film is such a blur that it's impossible to care for them. In "Black Hawk Down", a sense of urgency is constantly pushing the film forward. Every time Scott cuts to a wide-angle shot to show the incoming enemy, it will get the entire audience tense. But as soon as he brings you back down into the action, the tenseness turns into horror. At times it feels almost impossible to watch, but it is just as hard to turn away. There is the issue of the treatment of the Somalis in "Black Hawk Down". It's a sticky subject. I won't pretend that most of the Somalis aren't being treated as the enemy. But I will say that the film is not overly unfair. This is a film about battle, told from one side's point of view. If this were a story about the Somalis, then the Americans would be just as much the "bad guys". But this is battle, plain and simple, and no matter which way one looks at it, its barbaric. What would be unfair is if the film assumed it knew the other side's every thought and tried to simplify their story. This was done to the Japanese in "Pearl Harbor" with disastrous results. "Black Hawk Down" is a visceral film that shook me down to the core. It doesn't try to tell the political and moral complications behind all the chaos, which are far too vast and incomprehensible for any film to grasp. Film is a visual medium, and so Ridley Scott keeps the speechifying to a minimum and with his camera puts us in the middle of one of the biggest travesties since the Vietnam War.
Rating:
Summary: very good
Review: Black Hawk Down is another excellent war epic from the great Ridley Scott. A strong, emotionally moving two and a half hours. It is R, for Strong pervasive violence, strong language, and brief sexual references. Not for children, but a great, must see epic for any person. Its filled with wonderful acting and gripping war sequences. must own
Rating:
Summary: Black Hawk Down
Review: War is [bad], and it will always be [bad] but this movie is anything but [bad]. I know that this was a real event and that people died and I mourn those who lost their lives but this movie is a MUST see. The movie features breath taking effects, outstanding sounds, and has a great overall physique. I have watched this movie 3 times at the thearters and it never gets old. If you are a person who loved "Saving Private Ryan" and "Plat00n", then this is the next movie you will love. To wrap all this into a couple of words... THIS IS A MUST SEE!
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Summary: An important film to see, very well done.
Review: Before talking about the movie, and while talking about it, it's important for me to mention the book. My boyfriend (a former Ranger) has long spoken of "Black Hawk Down - A Story of Modern War" by Mark Bowden as being an excellent account of the conflict in Mogadishu, Somalia. It was a book that was on my long list of Books To Read Soon, but I hadn't ever gotten around to it. When the trailers for the movie started showing, I made an attempt to read the book before we went and saw the film, but I found the author's writing somewhat bland and I had no image of what some of the settings he talked about looked like, and thus I abandoned it after a few chapters in favor of other books. Then we saw the movie, and it renewed my interest in the book, as the book gives much more of the internal dialogue of the soldiers, and more detail. Having seen the film gave me a much better feel for what I was reading about; what the streets and buildings looked like, et cetera. I finished the book, and while I still have the same complaints about the author's writing style, it was a good book. The movie and the book are excellent companion pieces to each other. The movie...it's difficult in some ways to describe. It's not an "entertaining" movie, but it is an important film to see, simply to bear witness to the event itself. Some of the commercial reviews I've read are complaining about the gore in the movie; this strikes me as completely asinine. The movie doesn't make a huge deal of the blood and gore, and in fact, doesn't have the level of gore the book contains. The gore is simply a part of the story, and would be unavoidable if one wanted to portray the conflict with any degree of accuracy. If Ridley had lingered upon it unnecessarily, that would be one thing, but he does not. He conveyed the violent injuries and conditions that both sides of the fight had to endure, without crossing into gratuitousness. People who have a low threshold for violence will probably cringe at many points during this movie - there are horrific injuries sustained on both sides of the fight. But it is not blood for blood's sake. There are elements that were changed from the book, most of which seem reasonable due to time constraints and other restrictions. I think Ridley's depiction of the conditions in Mog (to my inexperienced eye) were probably fairly accurate; dirty, gritty, desperate, and cluttered. He didn't spend much time on the Somali side of the story, which was very noticable to me during the movie, and was something the book included quite a bit of. Again, issues of time constraints. On the whole, I enjoy war movies. While I didn't "enjoy" this movie per se, I will see it again to soak up more details. It's an epic story about a handful of extraordinary men, heroes, and it deserves all of the attention it's been getting. There's no superfluous love story, and there's not much humor to lighten the mood; this is a tale about the realities of war. Ridley (and Bowden as well) has done the men involved a great honor by sticking to the facts as much as possible.
Rating: 
Summary: Fast-paced and entertaining
Review: O.K. it's no "Saving Private Ryan"; the plot is a little thin and the character development is a little shallow. But, as far as action-packed war movies go, this is one of the best. As far as being "too" bloody or "too" graphic, well, I served in Desert Storm and trust me, it isn't close to the real thing.
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