Black Hawk Down Reviews
I also don't know how well this 2001 drama represents the events of October 3 and 4, 1993, though I can see that it represents them in a realist vein, referring to other war movies without becoming frivolous.
Black Hawk Down makes that point without preachment, in precise and pitiless imagery. And for that reason alone it takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.
A relentless immersion in combat strikingly realized but none too pleasurable to sit through.
Time Out
Top Critic[Scott] does a reasonable job sketching the complicated and contradictory political context, but attempts to bring in the odd Somali perspective are grossly inadequate.
A first-rate war movie that presents its subject so horrifyingly well that it doesn't need to probe or preach.
[D]efinitely worth seeing for those amazing battle sequences.
The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
It represents a particularly limiting application of hard-bitten manly values to experiences that can't help but transcend them.
One hell of a ride. For better or for worse, it will leave you stunned and reeling.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Black Hawk Down superbly visualizes journalist-author Mark Bowden's bestselling 'tale of modern war,' detailing a U.S. military misadventure in the Somalia of 1993.
A good, intense war movie that falls short of being a great one: Once the adrenaline wears off, you realize it's as dramatically satisfying as an MRE food ration.
I can think of no other instance when a country at war has presented on its movie theater screens such an excruciating account of battle, or such a sobering one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Black Hawk Down sees its job as putting us in the center of combat, and it never lets up. It remains visceral and raw until the very end, impressively so.
Black Hawk Down has a relentless force that makes character development almost beside the point.
Black Hawk Down is all dazzling craft and no redeeming art; it's simultaneously a superb piece of filmmaking and a highly suspect film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Black Hawk Down sends you away impressed, properly horrified and then thoughtful about the lessons ignored from the battle it exhaustively describes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Except for the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and the middle 45 of Pearl Harbor -- produced, like this film, by action overlord Jerry Bruckheimer -- no film has ever dropped us so convincingly into combat.
Scott keeps bringing home the shocks, using light and sound to underscore the visual tumult.
Films like this are more useful than gung-ho capers like Behind Enemy Lines. They help audiences understand and sympathize with the actual experiences of combat troops, instead of trivializing them into entertainments.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Despite all the hard work by an army of craftsmen working on location in Morocco, the film takes the easy way out, subsiding into a thing of technical challenges met rather than attempting to probe the events at a deeper level.
Compelling account of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Black Hawk Down, the unflinching depiction of the raid, is a noble victory.
The action is so rivetingly orchestrated, the crazed chaos of it so palpable, that the movie sucks you in.
| Original Score: 3/4
Scott boils down the war film genre to its purest, most devastating essence.
This huge $90 million undertaking is a personal best for producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a triumph for Scott and a war film of prodigious power.
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Invokes a ferocious cinéma-vérité style to make us not only see, but also feel, the destructive power of modern warfare.
A stunning depiction of war. So much so that you have to keep reminding yourself that this is not a documentary.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Driven by scenes of gripping, unflinching battle, touched by the director's talent for communicating through the colors he chooses.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
It's every bit as harrowing -- and also every bit as pointless and misguided -- as the botched military mission it depicts.
Something is lost in emotional power with a collective, almost abstract hero with whom one cannot make eye contact in the way one does with single-hero narratives.
Limbs explode, guts spill and blood splatters in an endurance test that is numbing, but nothing new.
No war movie I have ever seen so vividly shows battle from differing perspectives.
The Somalians feel like props, something to be plugged at a shooting gallery.
A beautifully filmed, scrupulously authentic but strangely evasive exercise in combat ultra-realism.
| Original Score: 3/4
Look out, everybody: Two of the most pandering, tactless filmmakers in Hollywood history are now teaching us about honor among soldiers.
Like Mr. Scott's G.I. Jane but this time with an all-boy cast.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
A triumph of pure filmmaking, a pitiless, unrelenting, no-excuses war movie so thoroughly convincing it's frequently difficult to believe it is a staged re-creation.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
A war movie so unflinching and so real there are scenes here and effects here that would make George S. Patton wince.
A studied composition in flying debris, fleeing crowds, and detached limbs.
While visually commanding as a painstaking re-creation, it's a major letdown as a motion picture.
