10 Awesome War Movies About Obscure Conflicts

Ridley Scott’s 2001 epic about a 1993 botched military engagement in Mogadishu, Somalia, remains one of the most powerful pieces of filmmaking about the hell of war.

Like many modern war movies - including some we've already seen on this list - Black Hawk Down has little to say about the wider conflict that it takes as its backdrop. We're given enough of a primer to understand what's at stake, but the film is more about the soldiers who suffer in the whirlwind of a shooting war they can't fully comprehend than it is about the complex history of peacekeeping operations in Somalia.

Things go badly wrong for a team of soldiers during an engagement in Mogadishu, Somalia's war-ravaged capital. Two helicopters are shot down, the soldiers sustain horrendous wounds, several are killed, and a pilot is captured. Things go from bad to worse as the exfiltration teams are unable to contact the trapped soldiers. After one long, gruelling night, the soldiers are evacuated, but not before nineteen of them lose their lives.

The film was widely celebrated, not least for the extraordinary ensemble cast, the visceral intensity of its action scenes, and its emotional range and depth.

But it was also controversial. At least one thousand Somalis were killed in the events that the film depicts, and where each of the American deaths is portrayed with great pathos, sympathy, and compassion, the Somali deaths are shown as exciting, as thrilling cannon-fodder slaughter. This led to accusations, which are hard to shake off, that the film was racist and dehumanising.

Powerful stuff - but proof that even films that show US military failure can be nakedly ideological.