This is topic Black Hawk Down in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.
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Posted by Aldo Baez (Member # 790) on 12-29-2001, 02:45 PM:
This movie *could have* been great. Its just a good movie. The only thing I felt during the movie was "Damn these guys are in big trouble." and "Ouch that had/has to hurt." I really didn't feel much of anything for any of the soldiers. The first maybe 45 minutes is spent talking about the mission and just seeing the comradeship on a military base. You really don't get to know much of the soldiers that you see throughout the movie. Then when they finally get shot or wounded it was just "Ouch". The movie is NON STOP action and violence. Its very gruesome and alot of people will probably get queasy. For about 2 hours you just see people shooting and getting shot at and there is very little break at all. Its exasperating in a sense but it really captures the situation the soldiers were in. Now that I look back the movie was just firefight after firefight trying to escape, and yes it was repetitive, but I did not find it boring like some people probably will. Again a good movie but not great, probably would have been much better if they setup the characters a little more. I didn't like the fact that at the end of the movie they printed out the names of the 19 soldiers who died, and had one line saying that 1000 Somalis died.
Posted by Dave Williams (Member # 299) on 01-10-2002, 11:28 AM:
Well I haven't seen the movie yet, did you see it at a pre-screening? I thought it wasn't out yet. Oh well.What I remember from the actual events is that the 19 soldiers were slaughtered and dragged naked through the streets by these somalians. I think that perhaps you give the somalians who died to much credit for only having one line in the film on how many died.
I don't know about you, but I dont particularly like the thought of american soldiers bieng dragged naked anywhere to be slauhhtered.
Dave
Thats just my opinion of reality, and I will let you know if the movie pays good homage to those that gave thier lives without care or concern for their own safety, just ours.
Posted by Aldo Baez (Member # 790) on 01-12-2002, 02:47 PM:
It's out in New York and L.A. I'm not going to go into the specifics of the rationale behind the US being there (The movie raises the question a bit but not much.) Yes the Somalis dragged our soldiers (I don't think it was all 19)naked through the streets, but there was alot more than that. The movie makes NO mention of any innocent Somali's being killed (and there had to be quite a few), which I guess was why I was a little disturbed at the message at the end. We messed up a mission pretty bad, we only lost 19, they lost 1000. How many innocent people died because of our mixup?