Word: hawkings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That is why Afghanistan is such a turning point. It marks the first great reversal of fortune for radical Islam. For two decades it tasted one victory after another: the Beirut bombings of 1983 that chased America out of Lebanon; "Black Hawk Down" that chased America out of Somalia; the first Afghan war that chased the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan--and led to the collapse of a superpower, no less. These were heady victories, as were the wounds inflicted with impunity on the other superpower: the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 destruction...
...BLACK HAWK DOWN Ridley Scott's harrowing replay of a 1993 Somalian debacle for U.S. troops is pure cinema in action. In nearly two hours of relentless warfare (think of Saving Private Ryan without the slow bits), it shows how a director can marshal images and sounds, biography and geography, to create emotion pictures. With Gladiator, Hannibal and now this ultimate war movie, Ridley's on a roll...
...that they could be. Afterward, Garrison pointed out that they carried out their mission successfully (he got his "personalities") and killed at least 300 of the enemy. It merely took more time and American blood than they ever imagined it would. In other words, you can see Black Hawk Down as antiwar if you're so inclined, but you cannot possibly see it as antisoldier. It is precisely that ambiguity that makes this picture such a compelling experience...
Still, there is less distance between the event Black Hawk Down recounts and the events that most of the other great war movies relate. You have to wonder if the movie's immediacy, its obvious analogies to Afghanistan, will frighten audiences away. This is a matter of some moment to Bruckheimer. His soft-spoken intelligence belies his fame as producer of big-scale action films (Top Gun, Armageddon). At 56, he has reached an age at which he wants to move beyond popcorn movies, and he observes that in Black Hawk Down he and Scott were trying very soberly...
...Black Hawk Down begins with a quotation from T.S. Eliot: "All our ignorance brings us closer to death." By the light of its flash-bang grenades, this movie seeks to banish some of that darkness. It offers a paradigm of what war in the 21st century is going to be--modernism run amuck as it defends itself against primitivism, innocence savagely fragmented in incomprehensible combat. 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...