Full military honours

Black Hawk Down, director Ridley Scott's frenetic account of what happened when elite US forces attempted to rescue a helicopter shot down in a Somalian war zone in 1993, begins with a line from Plato. 'Only the dead have seen the end of war,' quoth the ancient Greek. Indeed, and like war itself, the war movie won't go away.

In an America irrevocably changed by the events of 11 September, movies that bring the anguish and terror of battle alive - the Serbia-based Gene Hackman/Owen Wilson movie Behind Enemy Lines is the most obvious recent example - have assumed a new cutting-edge relevance. This wasn't the scenario Hollywood envisaged immediately after the Twin Towers collapsed. Then it was assumed that the appetite for on-screen carnage was exhausted, and several movies were hastily withdrawn. But, with the country put on a war footing and the swift removal of the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, that all changed. Although both Scott and Black Hawk Down producer Jerry Bruckheimer claim that the film's release has been pulled forward by almost three months to make it eligible for Oscar nominations, the effect of the post-11 September factor, America's sense of patriotism and renewed fascination with the military cannot be underestimated.

With Somalia increasingly mentioned as a possible future setting for the war on terrorism, Black Hawk Down, based on Mark Bowden's best-selling book, certainly seems timely. Bruckheimer has not only been one of the most successful producers of all time, but with hardware-loaded films such as Top Gun, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, he's the nearest thing the Pentagon has to a Hollywood representative. Ridley Scott, described by Alan Parker as 'the greatest visual artist working today' is a Teesside-born son of a Royal Engineer brigadier, his action-movie credentials recently primed on the Oscar-laden Gladiator. The film-makers' shoulder-to-shoulder British/American alliance is reflected in a cast that unusually has British actors Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner as US soldiers, alongside Australian Eric Bana, and Americans Josh Hartnett, Tom Sizemore and Sam Shepard. McGregor says that the idea September 11 might be a selling-point for the film 'makes my blood go cold' and Scott points out that filming was finished before the hijackings, though he does add that 'in my view, anything I set out to do is always relevant'. It no doubt helps that, unlike the many movies that followed in the wake of the Vietnam war, Scott's movie is relevant in a way that satisfies the current public mood.

After the 11 September attacks Francis Ford Coppola withdrew from promoting his revamped Apocalypse Now Redux, a film that shows the American military disunited and struggling with numerous internal demons. Black Hawk Down may present an equivocal view of battle, acknowledging the impossibility of waging a surgically 'clean', casualty-free campaign in a primitive foreign land, but like Behind Enemy Lines it defines a moral case for US military presence. In the latter a pilot is shot down while attempting to gather evidence of Serbian genocide camps, in the former the Delta Force crew is out to stop warlord Mohammed Adid disrupting delivery of aid to famine victims. 'We can help or we can sit back and watch the country destroy itself on CNN,' reasons Hartnett's Sgt Matt Eversmann as he rallies his troops.

The shift from war movies that question both the motives of soldiers and war itself to movies more sympathetic to the subject can be traced back to Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. For anyone who'd never come within a country mile of the smell of napalm in the morning (ie most of the movie-going public) that movie made the horrors of war more realistic than anything previously experienced on the big screen. But, it also suggested that inhuman acts are sometimes necessary to save humanity. Black Hawk Down has, not inaccurately, been likened to the anguished 20-minute Normandy landing sequence of Spielberg's film. Only this time the remorseless horror - rocket-launchers, endless gunfire, deadly snipers, severed torsos, makeshift field hospitals and bloodied stumps - lasts a further two hours. 'I am anti-war but pro-soldier,' says Scott. Black Hawk Down, which has the tag line 'leave no man behind', centres on the simple heroism of men in battle and their do-or-die camaraderie. 'It don't really matter what I think,' says hardened tough nut Norm Hooten (Eric Bana). 'Once the first bullet goes past your head politics and all that shit goes out the window.'

Both the director and producer take great pride in Black Hawk Down's painstaking realism. As in Behind Enemy Lines, state-of-the-art surveillance technology is shown to be capable of only so much, ultimately success or failure rests with the guys facing the firefight on the ground. Real-life Delta Force soldiers were employed as extras. 'I can't help think that some of the men I worked with are in Afghanistan right now,' McGregor recently told an interviewer. As is standard practice in modern military movies, the cast were put through a training regime but, when the film was shot in Morocco, it was the first time the US military had ever given official assistance to a movie shot on foreign soil. 'We managed to negotiate with the Pentagon to have the best flying team from the armed forces and so these guys came in and were treating it like a serious exercise. They loved it,' enthuses Ridley Scott.

But the episode Black Hawk Down recounts was hardly one of the most celebrated in US military history. A simple operation that went wrong, it left 19 soldiers dead while warlord Adid survived the attack. Black Hawk Down may celebrate the valour of its central characters but it's not simply triumphalist or jingoistic. It shows the pitiless tragedies of war, noticeably absent from television coverage of the Afghanistan war, in unflinching detail. At times it even strikes a cautionary note. 'Without victory there is no peace,' one of Adid's lieutenants tells his American captor before the helicopter is shot down, 'there will always be killing, this is how things are in our world.'

Plato would have understood. There will always be war, there will always be war movies, though few of them will assault the senses and recreate the slaughter as demonstrably as Black Hawk Down.