Black Hawk Down (film)

In 1992, during the famine in southern Somalia induced by the civil war, the United Nations Security Council authorizes a military operation with a peacekeeping mandate. However, by 1993, conflict ensues between UNOSOM II and the Mogadishu-based militia loyal to Mohamed Farrah Aidid. In response, U.S. President Clinton deploys Task Force Ranger – consisting of 3rd Battalion/75th Ranger Regiment, Delta Force operators, and flight crew of the 160th SOAR – to Mogadishu to capture Aidid, who has proclaimed himself president and steals Red Cross food shipments.

Outside Mogadishu, Rangers and Delta Force capture Osman Ali Atto, a faction leader selling arms to Aidid's militia. The US plans a mission to capture Omar Salad Elmi and Abdi Hassan Awale Qeybdiid, two of Aidid's top advisers.

Prior to the mission, Staff Sergeant Matthew Eversmann receives his first command, of Ranger Chalk Four, after his lieutenant has a seizure. Members of his chalk include fresh 18-year-old Private First Class Todd Blackburn and Specialist John Grimes, a former desk clerk.

The operation begins, and Delta Force operators capture Aidid's advisers inside the target building while the Rangers and helicopters escorting the ground convoy take heavy fire from the rallying militia. Blackburn is severely injured when he falls from one of the Black Hawk helicopters, so three Humvees led by Staff Sergeant Jeff Struecker are detached from the convoy to return Blackburn to the UN-held Mogadishu Airport. Grimes is separated from the rest of Eversmann's chalk after surviving an RPG explosion.

Just after Struecker's column departs, Black Hawk Super Six-One, piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Clifton "Elvis" Wolcott, is shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade. Wolcott and his co-pilot are killed, two crew chiefs are wounded, and two Delta Force snipers on board escape in an MH-6 Little Bird helicopter though one dies later from his wounds.

The ground forces are rerouted to converge on the crash site. The militia erects roadblocks, preventing Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight's Humvee column from reaching the area and forcing them to sustain heavy casualties. Meanwhile, two Ranger chalks, including Eversmann's unit, reach the crash site and set up a defensive perimeter. However, another helicopter, Super Six-Four piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, is also shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashes several blocks away.

With the primary Ranger forces led by Captain Mike Steele pinned down and sustaining heavy casualties, no ground forces can reach Super Six-Four or reinforce the Rangers defending Super Six-One. Two Delta Force snipers, Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart and Master Sergeant Gary Gordon, are inserted by helicopter to secure Super Six-Four's crash site, where they find Durant still alive. Despite their heroic actions, the site is eventually overrun, Gordon and Shughart are killed, and Durant is captured.

McKnight's column relinquishes their attempt to reach Six-One's crash site, and returns to base with their prisoners and the casualties. The men prepare to go back to extract the Rangers and the fallen pilots and Major General Garrison asks for reinforcements from the 10th Mountain Division, including Malaysian and Pakistani armored units from the UN coalition.

As night falls, Aidid's militia launches a sustained assault on the trapped Americans at Super Six-One's crash site. The militants are held off throughout the night by strafing runs and rocket attacks from AH-6J Little Bird helicopter gunships until the 10th Mountain Division's relief column is able to reach the American soldiers. The wounded and casualties are evacuated in the vehicles, but a few Rangers and Delta Force soldiers are forced to run on foot from the crash site to reach the Safe Zone at the soccer stadium.

End titles

The end titles recount the immediate aftermath of the mission and the end of US military operations in Somalia: Michael Durant was released after 11 days of captivity, after which President Bill Clinton withdrew all US forces from Somalia. During the raid, 19 American soldiers and more than 1,000 Somalis died. The names of the 19 soldiers who died are listed by name, including Gordon and Shughart, the first soldiers to receive the Medal of Honor posthumously since the Vietnam War. Mohamed Farah Aidid was killed in 1996; General Garrison retired the following day.

Adapting Black Hawk Down: a Story of Modern War (1999) by Mark Bowden was the idea of director Simon West, who suggested to Jerry Bruckheimer that he should buy the film rights and let West direct. West felt too tired after working on Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), so he decided to drop out (West later said that he regretted the decision).[7] Ridley Scott was hired to direct the film after he decided to not work on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003).[8]

Ken Nolan was credited as screenwriter, and others contributed uncredited: Mark Bowden wrote an adaptation of his own book,[9] Stephen Gaghan was hired to do a rewrite,[10] Steven Zaillian[11] and Ezna Sands[12] rewrote the majority of Gaghan and Nolan's work, actor Sam Shepard (MGen. Garrison) rewrote some of his own dialogue,[13] and Eric Roth wrote Josh Hartnett and Eric Bana's concluding speeches.[11] Ken Nolan was on set for four months rewriting his script and the previous work by Gaghan, Zaillian, and Bowden.[14] He was given sole screenwriting credit by a WGA committee.[15]

The book relied on a dramatization of participant accounts, which were the basis of the movie. SPC John Stebbins was renamed as fictional "John Grimes." Stebbins had been convicted by court martial in 1999 for the rape and forcible sodomy of his six-year-old daughter.[16] Mark Bowden said the Pentagon, ever sensitive about public image, decided to alter factual history by requesting the change.[17] Bowden wrote early screenplay drafts, before Bruckheimer gave it to screenwriter Nolan.[10] The POW-captor conversation, between pilot Mike Durant and militiaman Firimbi, is from a Bowden script draft.

To keep the film at a manageable length, 100 key figures in the book were condensed to 39. The movie also does not feature any Somali actors.[18] Additionally, no Somali consultants were hired for accuracy, according to writer Bowden.[19][20]

For military verisimilitude, the Ranger actors took a one-week Ranger familiarization course at Fort Benning (now Fort Moore), the Delta Force actors took a two-week commando course from the 1st Special Warfare Training Group at Fort Bragg, and Ron Eldard and the actors playing 160th SOAR helicopter pilots were lectured by captured aviator Michael Durant at Fort Campbell.[21]

The U.S. Army supplied the materiel and the helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Most pilots (e.g., Keith Jones, who speaks some dialogue) had participated in the historic battle on October 3–4, 1993.[22]

On the last day of their week-long Army Ranger orientation at Fort Benning, the actors who portrayed the Rangers received letters slipped under their doors. It thanked them for their hard work, and asked them to "tell our story true", signed with the names of the men who died in the Mogadishu firefight.[22] A platoon of Rangers from B-3/75 did the fast-roping scenes and appeared as extras; John Collette, a Ranger Specialist during the battle, served as a stunt performer.[23]

Many of the actors bonded with the soldiers who trained them for their roles. Actor Tom Sizemore said, "What really got me at training camp was the Ranger Creed. I don't think most of us can understand that kind of mutual devotion. It's like having 200 best friends and every single one of them would die for you".[22]

Filming began in March 2001 in Salé, Morocco, and concluded in late June.[21]

Although the filmmakers considered filming in Jordan, they found the city of Amman too built up and landlocked. Scott and production designer Arthur Max subsequently turned to Morocco, where they had previously worked on Gladiator. Scott preferred that urban setting for authenticity.[22] Most of the film was photographed in the cities of Rabat and Salé; the Task Force Ranger base sequences were filmed at Kénitra[24] and Mehdya.

Soon after Black Hawk Down's release, the Somali Justice Advocacy Center (SJAC) in California denounced what they felt was its brutal and dehumanizing depiction of Somalis and called for its boycott.[20] The SJAC in Minnesota called for a boycott of the film for its portrayal of Somalis as "savage beasts shooting each other."[58]

In a radio interview, Brendan Sexton, who portrayed ranger PVT. Richard "Alphabet" Kowalewski, said the version of the film which made it onto theater screens significantly differed from the one recounted in the original script. According to him, many scenes asking hard questions of the US regarding the violent realities of war and the true purpose of their mission in Somalia were cut.[59]

In a review featured in The New York Times, film critic Elvis Mitchell expressed dissatisfaction with the film's "lack of characterization" and opined that the film "reeks of glumly staged racism".[60] Owen Gleiberman and Sean Burns, the film critics for Entertainment Weekly and the alternative newspaper Philadelphia Weekly, respectively, echoed the sentiment that the depiction was racist.[61][62]

American film critic Wheeler Winston Dixon also found the film's "absence of motivation and characterization" disturbing, and wrote that while American audiences might find the film to be a "paean to patriotism", other audiences might find it to be a "deliberately hostile enterprise"; nevertheless, Dixon lauded the film's "spectacular display of pyrotechnics coupled with equally adroit editing."[63]

Jerry Bruckheimer, the film's producer, rejected these criticisms on The O'Reilly Factor, putting them down to political correctness in part due to Hollywood's liberal leanings.[62][64]

Somali nationals say that the African actors chosen to play the Somalis in the film do not resemble the culturally unique features of the Horn of Africa, nor does the language they communicate in sound like the Afro-Asiatic tongue spoken by the Somali people. They also state that the abrasive way lines are delivered and lack of authenticity regarding Somali culture fails to capture the tone, mannerisms, and spirit of actual life in Somalia. No Somali actors were used in the movie.[18] Somalis attending a screening of a pirated copy of the film at a theater in Mogadishu said the film ignored the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of civilian adults and children caused by the Americans.[58][65]

In an interview with the BBC, the faction leader Osman Ali Atto said that many aspects of the film are factually incorrect. Taking exception with the ostentatious depiction of his character, Ali Atto claimed he looks nothing like the actor who portrayed him, nor that he smoked cigars or wore earrings.[66] These details were later confirmed by SEAL Team Six sniper Howard E. Wasdin in his 2012 memoirs. Wasdin also indicated that while the character in the movie ridiculed his captors, in reality, Atto seemed concerned that Wasdin and his men had been sent to kill rather than apprehend him.[67] Atto additionally stated that he had not been consulted about the project, nor was he approached for permission to use his likeness, and that the film sequence re-enacting his arrest contained several inaccuracies:[66]

First of all when I was caught on 21 September, I was only travelling with one Fiat 124, not three vehicles as it shows in the film[...] And when the helicopter attacked, people were hurt, people were killed[...] The car we were travelling in, (and) I have got proof, it was hit at least 50 times. And my colleague Ahmed Ali was injured on both legs[...] I think it was not right, the way they portrayed both the individual and the action. It was not right.[66]

Navy SEAL Wasdin similarly remarked that while olive green military rigger's tape was used to mark the roof of the car in question in the movie, his team in actuality managed to track down Atto's whereabouts using a much more sophisticated technique involving the implantation of a homing device. This was hidden in a cane presented to Atto as a gift from a contact who routinely met with him, which eventually led the team directly to the faction leader.[67]

Malaysian military officials whose own troops were involved in the fighting have likewise raised complaints regarding the film's accuracy. Retired Brigadier-General Abdul Latif Ahmad, who at the time commanded Malaysian forces in Mogadishu, told the AFP news agency that Malaysian moviegoers would be under the erroneous impression that the real battle was fought by the Americans alone, with Malaysian troops relegated to serving as "mere bus drivers to ferry them out".[68]

General Pervez Musharraf, who later became President of Pakistan after a coup, similarly accused the filmmakers of not crediting the work done by the Pakistani soldiers. In his autobiography In the Line of Fire: A Memoir, Musharraf wrote:

The outstanding performance of the Pakistani troops under adverse conditions is very well known at the UN. Regrettably, the film Black Hawk Down ignores the role of Malaysia and Pakistan in Somalia. When U.S. troops were trapped in the thickly populated Madina Bazaar area of Mogadishu, it was the Seventh Frontier Force Regiment of the Pakistan Army that reached out and extricated them. The bravery of the U.S. troops notwithstanding, we deserved equal, if not more, credit; but the filmmakers depicted the incident as involving only Americans.[69]

• Battle of Mogadishu (1993)
• Black Hawk Down (book)

• Cohen, David S. (2008). Screen Plays: How 25 Scripts Made It to a Theater Near You—For Better or Worse. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-0611-8919-7.

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