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Movie reviewed in this article: Columbia Pictures Corporation, Black Hawk Down Black Hawk Down is a statement of masculinity. Women make only a few marginal appearances. There is no love interest of any kind. Families are similarly marginalized, subjects of only a few scrappy references. Black Hawk is about men among men. It is also a celebration of manhood. There are no histrionics, no soliloquies about meaning and purpose. Instead, men make a desperate, blood-saturated, ultimately vain effort to save a comrade with a severed artery. Two Delta Force troopers unobtrusively, matter-of-factly, insist on going in to protect a downed helicopter pilot, knowing it means their own deaths. Black Hawk Down depicts men acting with courage and competence for survival, for comrades, but ultimately for their own honor and self-respect. These images are not universally popular even in post-September 11 America. The film's structure poses challenges of a different sort. Black Hawk Down adheres closely to Mark Bowden's best-selling book (New York, 2000), but foreshortens even that highly focused account. Black Hawk has no back-story beyond a few minutes of scrolling, on the intellectual level of “a long time ago in a galaxy far away.” That removes historians’ usual comfort zone of picking factual nits and critiquing nuances of interpretation. Instead, they are dropped into the film with the suddenness of a helicopter assault and left to make their way like a patrol isolated in a strange city.
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