"Black Hawk Down" is a film that plays like a two-and-a-half-hour illustration of a news story. It has no plot, no characters, no relationships, no sense of place in one's life; it's simply an extended headline, and when it ends it evaporates from our minds in a moment. It's the story of the horrendous day in Mogadishu in 1993, when a small force of American soldiers was misled into trying to kidnap the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid from a supposed meeting place in the center of the city, and airlift him to the U.S. base at the airport just outside town. When Aidid turned out not to be where he was supposed to be, the mission's men confronted ambushes by local militia who knew every house, every block, every street that the Americans tried to escape through. "Black Hawk Down" is the story of that fifteen-hour fight, from beginning to end. The problem is that it's nothing more; there's no sense of a human context. There's not even one human being in the film, just stick figures grunting orders, shooting and dying.

Having said that, the actual photography is an amazing piece of work by director Ridley Scott and cinematographer Slavomir Idziak, with brilliant editing of the battle scenes by Pietro Scalia, making it perhaps the best film ever about what it's like to be a soldier in a firefight. Scott keeps the camera low to the ground; we see what his soldiers see and very little more. He's trusted himself to make a film about nothing more - or less - than a street battle.

The Americans are Delta Force troops, supposedly the very best of the best (apparently Delta Force troops grunt a special grunt to each other before each action, which would be laughable if it weren't taken so seriously by everyone in the film - one wonders if Israeli soldiers, outnumbered severely in their various wars, needed grunts to motivate themselves), and the title refers to one of the helicopters, a Black Hawk, shot down by the Somalis while bringing in the Americans.