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<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20020118/3785293s.htm" target="_blank">http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20020118/3785293s.htm</a>
'Black Hawk' is a brutal flight Entertainment War lessons for actors playing the soldiers, cover story, 10D * * * * review, 13D
By Scott Bowles
USA TODAY
NEW YORK -- Like the soldiers in Black Hawk Down, audiences will find themselves under siege the moment the mission begins.
The Ridley Scott-Jerry Bruckheimer film, which opens today nationwide after opening Dec. 28 in New York and L.A., compresses the 16-hour Somali firefight into an unrelenting 2-hour battle scene. Scott substitutes detonations for dialogue, explosions for exposition, to tell the story of the worst American combat casualties since Vietnam.
But with the perils facing U.S. troops overseas after Sept. 11, are audiences ready for the bloody re-enactment of the battle that claimed 18 Americans in 1993? The film never flinches from the fates of soldiers, some of whom are beaten, shot and literally torn apart.
''It's not an easy film to watch,'' says film critic/historian Leonard Maltin. ''It will be interesting to see if people can look past the brutality and see the heroes being portrayed.''
Scott believes they can. ''People want to know what soldiers are facing'' in Afghanistan, he says. ''They're drawn to the truth, even if it's hard to watch.''
Hawk takes the frenetic opening of the D-Day invasion in Saving Private Ryan and maintains that pace throughout the film. Yet it does so with only one computer-generated effect, of a spiraling helicopter hit by a grenade. The rest of the movie, shot in Morocco, uses the real machinery, much like the groundbreaking war film Apocalypse Now.
''I didn't want something that looked artificial,'' Scott says. ''This was a real event that seemed to be in the news for only a few days. If we were taking the chance to tell the true story of what combat is like, we had to be as right as possible.''
If truth really is the first casualty of war, then it escapes with only superficial wounds in the film, says Sgt. Matt Eversmann, one of the men who survived the firefight. ''They got the most important part right,'' says Eversmann, played in the film by Josh Hartnett. ''The men who fought did what they set out to do and did it bravely.''
Despite rave reviews, the film received no Golden Globe nominations, a snub that rankles Hartnett. ''I don't see how a movie so realistic about an important world event didn't get nominated for anything.''
Scott sent actors through military training at Fort Benning (Ga.), Fort Campbell (Ky.) and Fort Bragg (N.C.). The Army provided four Black Hawk helicopters and 140 personnel to add authenticity.
Tom Sizemore added his own by getting to know his real-life counterpart, Lt. Col. Danny McKnight. ''He didn't run or duck for cover (during the raid) because he didn't want to show the men under him that he was afraid,'' Sizemore says. ''So my character doesn't, either.''
Hawk isn't completely faithful to Mark Bowden's best-selling book. It pays little attention to the thousands of Somalis who were killed, blends some characters and fudges a few facts. Soldiers go without goggles and wear their names on their helmets so moviegoers can keep track of the stars in the chaos. At the request of the Pentagon, one real-life soldier's name, John Stebbins, was changed because he is serving 30 years in a military prison for raping his daughter.
The infamous images of soldiers' bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu also were omitted, Scott says, because that happened the day after the firefight. He wanted to keep the battle as close to real time as possible.
''I just wanted to show a glimpse of how soldiers put their lives on the line for us every day,'' he says. ''Because we often don't seem to notice.''
Eversmann did. In one scene, a soldier picks up the severed hand of a comrade and puts it in his jacket. ''That happened,'' Eversmann recalls. ''We didn't want to leave anyone behind, even something like that.''
The scene, he says, ''told me they got the message right. You could never really capture what happened in Somalia. Even I can't remember it all.
''But we never gave up on that mission, and that's what comes through in the movie.''
[ 19 January 2002: Message edited by: ORAC ]</p>