Celluloid Somalia.

• Author: McKissack, Fred, Jr.
• Position: In the Mix - Black Hawk Down; No Man's Land

At the beginning of Black Hawk Down, the audience reads that Plato believed only the dead know the end of war. But Ridley Scott thinks he knows the end of war. His movie will promote a strong sense of nationalism and fuel revenge fantasies for the military, which aided in its making. But more importantly for him, it will generate a cache of Oscar nominations and higher foreign distribution rights.

Scott's Black Hawk Down is a first-class war film. Ever the auteur, Scott tops Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan in creating a hellish cinematic landscape illuminated by tracer bullets and explosions, littered with body parts, painted by the blood and flesh of Americans and Somalis. But only the Americans are cast in a sacred light. The residents of Mogadishu are one-dimensional characters in their own country: either crazed gunmen indiscriminately shooting at anyone, or noble savages to be pitied. When the Somalis speak, and it's almost always to Americans, it's with a stomach-turning callousness that feels fakey and racist.

The movie opens with a little background. We are told that 300,000 Somalis---derisively referred to as "skinnies" by American troops--have already died in a civil war. The Marines landed in 1992 to restore order in Mogadishu and make sure food shipments got to the people. Things quieted down. The Marines left, and the warlords returned. In 1993, President Clinton sent in U.S. Army Rangers and members of the Delta Force to try and capture Mohammed Farah Aidid. Scott illustrates Aidid's brand of realpolitik when his troops brazenly, and in front of a U.S. helicopter, gun down starving people at a makeshift food distribution site. This is Aidid's food, and Aidid's war, we are meant to understand.

This scene sets the stage for what is to unfold in a fifteen-hour battle that took the lives of eighteen U.S. soldiers and approximately 1,000 Somalis, some of whom were probably civilians because Aidid's men didn't have the courtesy to wear uniforms like many of this country's previous adversaries. Scott's style puts you in the battle. You feel the moments of insecurity and lack of clarity, where eighteen-year-olds go from high school to jump school and into the street. They're led by middle-aged men, grounded in procedures and process, steeped in duty and honor, and they, too, have to make decisions that have far-reaching political ramifications.

Staff Sergeant Eversmann (Josh Hartnett), ostensibly the protagonist of the film, is...