:Black Hawk Down:

The Plot: Ninty-nine elite U.S. soldiers drop into Somalia to capture two top lieutenants of a renegade warlord and find themselves in a desperate battle with a large force of heavily-armed Somalis. It based on a true story!

Review: If they ever make a war movie more riveting than Black Hawk Down, I dont want to see it.

Imagine the intensity of the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan sustained for more than two relentless hours. Like Spielbergs heart-wrenching re-creation of the D-Day landing, Black Hawk Down puts you into a soldiers boots as the bullets whiz by, rockets explode in your ears and comrades fall all around you.
Director Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator) builds pulse-pounding suspense atop Ken Nolans script adapted from Mark Bowdens book about a real-life mission gone horribly awry. On the afternoon of Oct. 3, 1993, 140 or so U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos swooped into Mogadishu, Somalia, to "extract" two top lieutenants of ruthless Somali warlord Mohamed Aidid.
To put it mildly, things did not go according to plan. The mission was designed to last no more than an hour. But one minor mishap, combined with the determination of American forces to not leave behind any of their number, precipitated the bloodiest U.S. military action since Vietnam. When the smoke cleared the following day, 18 U.S. soldiers and up to a thousand Somali rebels (depending upon whose estimate you believe) lay dead.
In the early going, Nolans script and Scotts direction break the incident down into black and white, literally (Aidids evil minions are all black; the noble American troops are all white) and figuratively (the warlords men slaughter dozens of innocent civilians scrambling for air-dropped U.N. rations).
>But there was no need to stack the deck; the real-life scenario was tense enough. The movie carnage is graphic and the battle sequences both harrowing and nonstop as our guys, absurdly outnumbered by thousands of Aidids well-armed minions, fight their way out block by bloody block, building by crumbling building, dragging their dead and wounded with them. At times it seems as if every man, woman and child in Mogadishu must have taken up arms against the Americans.
A few film reviewers have set ambushes as well, opening fire on Black Hawk Downs perceived lack of political context. The central incident took place during the Clinton administration, but the filmmakers focus more on the human drama than in dissecting the culpability of American politicians and military mucky-mucks.
The film has also come under attack for bare-bones character development that too often falls back upon familiar war-movie cliches. Theres some merit to that allegation; Black Hawk Down tells us nothing we didnt already know about the hell of war and the nature of valor. And it compresses so many tales of courage under fire into one nerve-racking narrative that it leaves little room for individual heroics.
Trust me -- none of that matters once the film begins its inexorable advance toward the breaking loose of all hell. Scott knows a thing or two about lensing action; although we sometimes lose track of whos who in the heat of battle, the director creates a sort of frenzied, furious poetry out of the chaos.
Told from the perspective of the soldiers who fought and died in the narrow, dusty streets, Black Hawk Down stands as one of the most gripping accounts of combat ever committed to celluloid.