20 years ago today, I went to my local AMC theater to watch Black Hawk Down...director Ridley Scott's intense movie about the 1993 raid that U.S. special forces conducted in Mogadishu, Somalia, to apprehend a group of Somali warlords.
Known as the Battle of Mogadishu, this military operation resulted in the deaths of 19 American soldiers, the capture of a U.S. serviceman and the downing of two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters by enemy-launched rocket-propelled grenades. It was this operation—despite it being a technical victory since the targeted warlords were successfully captured—that led to the United States withdrawing from Somalia less than one year after starting what was supposed to be a humanitarian and peacekeeping mission in that wartorn and famine-ridden country.
Black Hawk Down was an intense movie from start to finish—with Ridley Scott conveying riveting action sequences using the narrow camera shutter-angle technique that he employed so well in the Oscar-winning epic Gladiator less than two years earlier.
Not only was Black Hawk Down such a well-crafted war film, but it unsurprisingly employed an amazing music score by composer Hans Zimmer as well. The most-memorable track from that score is Leave No Man Behind...which is featured in the YouTube video embedded below. That track is so engrossing that I used it for the Cinematography Project which I shot during film school at Cal State Long Beach in 2002!
Ridley Scott can do no wrong...even though I never watched his recent flick, House of Gucci. Happy Tuesday.
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