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| | Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Fog of war |
 | | In "Black Hawk Down," adapted from the nonfiction best-seller by journalist Mark Bowden, Ridley Scott is after the real thing: a grueling, relentless, moment-by-moment account of the 1993 battle in which two U.S. Army helicopters were downed and nearly 100 Special Forces troops were trapped overnight in a hostile section of Mogadishu, Somalia. |
 | | On one hand, the film version of "Black Hawk Down," unlike the book, provides virtually no context for the famine and civil war in Somalia, and presents the citizens of Mogadishu as a teeming, vicious horde, an angry fl tide that engulfs the lonely emissaries of civilization. |
 | | Inevitably, Scott and the producers have attempted to recast "Black Hawk Down" as a story of American military heroism, rather than a grim fable of a Murphy's-law mission doomed by arrogance, incompetence and sheer bad luck. |
| archive.salon.com /ent/movies/review/2001/12/28/black_hawk_down/index.html (1167 words) |
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