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Black Hawk Down Movie Review

Black Hawk Down is a 2001 war film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Josh Hartnett. It’s a very mediocre movie that did not appeal to me in the slightest.

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“Nobody asks to be a hero,

it just sometimes turns out that way“

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When an elite force of American soldiers is tasked with the mission to nab a Somali warlord’s top lieutenants, they find themselves ambushed by a large group of heavily-armed Somalis instead. This is one of the worst Ridley Scott movies to me personally. I do not understand for the life of me how it got great reviews when it’s such an inferior film to any of his other movies or compared to much stronger war movies out there.

This film showcased Ridley Scott exhibiting his worst tendencies. It is propulsive and action-heavy, but it’s so fast-paced and filled with countless battle sequences that it quickly grew tiresome for me. I prefer my war movies to be dramas than action spectacles, so this was certainly not my cup of tea.

The storytelling is atrocious here. We do not get any insight into this war or region in general. In fact, Scott went out of his way to just depict Americans and not Somalis and their side, making for a movie that is awfully racist and nationalistic. The biggest offender is its pro-war stance or at least a pro-military one. Whenever a war movie doesn’t become an anti-war story, we’ve got a problem and that was certainly the case here.

Black Hawk Down is also populated with underdeveloped and uninteresting characters. They do not get flashed out at any point in this thin story and instead we are left with just fodder to be killed. A couple of scenes tried to humanize them, but the majority of the movie was just action.

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The movie did receive two Oscars, but I did not like how it was edited and paced. It’s a painfully long and boring movie that never formed a coherent plot for itself. The acting is fine (Josh Hartnett is the standout) and the sound and cinematography are quite strong, but otherwise the movie’s a pointless mess.