A relentless immersion in combat strikingly realized but none too pleasurable to sit through.
ColeSmithey.com
August 23, 2009
Black Hawk Down" is a precise vision of how little war has changed in spite of America's high-tech equipment and extensive vocabulary of modern tactics.
Black Hawk Down makes that point without preachment, in precise and pitiless imagery. And for that reason alone it takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.
No film from the Zeroes - hell, maybe ever - more forcefully imparted the horrors of war as thoroughly, coherently and hauntingly. Even justified wars run rampant with monstrosities, and this showed just how critical camaraderie can be in conquering them.
[D]efinitely worth seeing for those amazing battle sequences.
Common Sense Media
January 02, 2011
Violent depiction of a risky rescue; adults only.
Time Out
June 24, 2006
[Scott] does a reasonable job sketching the complicated and contradictory political context, but attempts to bring in the odd Somali perspective are grossly inadequate.
A first-rate war movie that presents its subject so horrifyingly well that it doesn't need to probe or preach.
BrandonFibbs.com
February 28, 2008
While fine films like Saving Private Ryan depict warfare at its worst, they do not depict warfare in modernity. I cannot imagine a better representation of war, with all of its urban complexities, than Black Hawk Down.
I also don't know how well this 2001 drama represents the events of October 3 and 4, 1993, though I can see that it represents them in a realist vein, referring to other war movies without becoming frivolous.
