'Black Hawk' Goes Where Hollywood Wary to Tread

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The soldiers are mostly young, often scared, never "cool." There is no romance, no pretty nurse waiting tearily back at base. No swashbuckling hero arrives to save the day.

And the grim, chaotic firefight offers no easy answers.

After months of Hollywood soul-searching about the post-Sept. 11 future of entertainment, in thunders a powerful war movie that defies Tinseltown notions of patriotism, makes Rambo look like a cartoon cutout and redefines what it means to be a soldier.

"Black Hawk Down" recreates in relentless, unsentimental detail the 15-hour battle of Oct. 3, 1993, that saw an elite group of U.S. forces pinned down in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in the bloodiest struggle for survival involving American soldiers since the Vietnam War. Eighteen soldiers were killed.

It portrays close armed combat in a far-away country in all its bloody confusion and hits U.S. movie theaters on Friday, Dec. 28, just as thousands of American Marines and special forces are locked in a ground operation in Afghanistan.

Had "Black Hawk Down," based on the book of the same name by U.S. journalist Mark Bowden, been made after Sept. 11, it might have resorted to flag-waving jingoism, escapist action adventure, or a vehicle for superstars Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tom Cruise.

But the movie was completed in August, is ambiguous in its message, and has a largely unfamiliar cast of actors whose faces and egos are barely discernible beneath their military crew cuts and grimy helmets.

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That movie will kick ass. I'm going to buy a copy of the book this week.

Counting the days until 01/18/01 full release of the movie. I couldn't put the book down after seeing it in an airport bookstore. It's also surprising to find out how many people that don't know or remember this incident. Probably even Clinton has put it out of his mind.

I'm gonna guess that "is ambiguous in its' message" stands for "not antiwar" in limousine-liberal speak.