Black Hawk Down (film) - Criticisms

Criticisms

Soon after Black Hawk Down's release, the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in California denounced what they felt was its brutal and dehumanizing depiction of Somalis and called for its boycott.

In a radio interview, Brendan Sexton, an actor who briefly appeared in the movie, said that the version of the film which made it onto theater screens was significantly different from the one recounted in the original script. According to him, many scenes asking hard questions of the U.S. troops with regard to the violent realities of war, the true purpose of their mission in Somalia, etc., were cut out.

In a review featured in The New York Times, film critic Elvis Mitchell expressed dissatisfaction at the film's "lack of characterization", and noted the film "reeks of glumly staged racism". Owen Gliberman and Sean Burns, the film critics for the mainstream magazine Entertainment Weekly and the alternative newspaper Philadelphia Weekly, respectively, echoed the sentiment that the depiction was racist. Jerry Bruckheimer, the film's producer, rejected such claims on The O'Reilly Factor, putting them down to political correctness in part due to Hollywood's liberal leanings.

Somali nationals charge that the African actors chosen to play the Somalis in the film do not in the least bit resemble the racially unique peoples of the Horn of Africa nor does the language they communicate in sound like the Afro-Asiatic tongue spoken by the Somali people. The abrasive manner in which lines are delivered and the film's inauthentic vision of Somali culture, they add, fails to capture the tone, mannerisms and spirit of actual life in Somalia. When shown to crowds of Somalis in Somalia, young men cheered whenever an American soldier's character was shot on screen.

In an interview with the BBC, the faction leader Osman Ali Atto indicated that many aspects of the film are factually incorrect. He took exception to the ostentatious character chosen to portray him, who neither looks like him in real life nor does he smoke cigars or wear earrings, facts which were later confirmed by SEAL Team Six sniper Howard E. Wasdin in his 2012 memoirs. Wasdin also indicated that while the character in the movie ridiculed his captors, Atto in reality seemed concerned that Wasdin and his men had been sent to kill rather than apprehend him. Atto additionally stated that he was not consulted about the project or approached for permission, and that the film sequence re-enacting his arrest contained several inaccuracies:

First of all when I was caught on 21 September, I was only travelling with one Fiat 124, not three vehicles as it shows in the film And when the helicopter attacked, people were hurt, people were killed The car we were travelling in, (and) I have got proof, it was hit at least 50 times. And my colleague Ahmed Ali was injured on both legs I think it was not right, the way they portrayed both the individual and the action. It was not right.

Navy Seal Wasdin similarly remarked that while olive green military rigger's tape was used to mark the roof of the car in question in the movie, his team in actuality managed to track down Atto's whereabouts using a much more sophisticated technique involving the implantation of a homing device in a cane. The cane was then presented as a gift for Atto to a contact who routinely met with him, which eventually led the team directly to the faction leader.

Malaysian military officials whose own troops were involved in the fighting have likewise raised complaints regarding the film's accuracy. Retired Brigadier-General Abdul Latif-Ahmed, who at the time commanded Malaysian forces in Mogadishu, told the AFP news agency that Malaysian moviegoers would be under the wrong impression that the real battle was fought by the Americans alone, while Malaysian troops were "mere bus drivers to ferry them out".

General Pervez Musharraf, who later became President of Pakistan after a coup, similarly accused the filmmakers of not crediting the work done by the Pakistani soldiers. In his autobiography In the Line of Fire: A Memoir, Musharraf wrote:

The outstanding performance of the Pakistani troops under adverse conditions is very well known at the UN. Regrettably, the film Black Hawk Down ignores the role of Pakistan in Somalia. When U.S. troops were trapped in the thickly populated Madina Bazaar area of Mogadishu, it was the Seventh Frontier Force Regiment of the Pakistan Army that reached out and extricated them. The bravery of the U.S. troops notwithstanding, we deserved equal, if not more, credit; but the filmmakers depicted the incident as involving only Americans.