Black Hawk Down

Ridley Scott’s 2001 film covers a raid in Mogadishu on 3 and 4 October 1993 and the night that follows it. Mark Bowden’s book had already run as a newspaper serial in the Philadelphia Inquirer in late 1997. Bowden wrote the first screenplay of his life for this film. By his account Ridley Scott liked the roles it opened for Somali characters most of all, and some of those ideas carried into the script Ken Nolan took over and finished. Bowden still calls the finished screenplay Nolan’s work. Scott ran up to eleven cameras at once, there is almost no digital effects work, and Morocco stands in for Mogadishu. Slawomir Idziak’s high contrast images gather the event rather than compose it, so the geography is hard to hold and twenty men in matching uniforms harder still. It won Film Editing and Sound, and was nominated without winning in Directing and Cinematography. A day before the wide release, Somali leaders in Minneapolis called for a boycott, voiced by Omar Jamal of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center. A good fit if you want one night tracked hour by hour in coverage gathered rather than staged. Not for you if you want the film itself to explain why the Somali side fights; that account stops with the opening titles.