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The Batlord · 06-29-2018, 11:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chula Vista

Black Hawk Down made the US military (and government) look like ****. You still implying it had the Pentagon's backing? And funding? Simply because one soldier was a PR nightmare?

Way to lose sight of the big picture. Movie was extremely well made with lots of awesome special FX, but if at the end of it you felt compelled to join the army..... well, you were pretty damn ****ed up years before the movie came out.

That movie, along with the other's I listed, completely destroyed the John Wayne "America, Gung-Ho" cliche forever.

Wanna watch propaganda? Check out "The Green Berets". Don't be drinking any soda during it. You might hurt your nostrils.

Oh my bad you're totally right. There was no military involvement in Black Hawk Down.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...=.4a82fd5982bc

Quote:

That version of events and the portrayal of what it was like to fight in the streets of Mogadishu were shaped by Army Rangers and Delta Force soldiers who survived the mission, and by the Department of Defense, which provided extensive support -- Black Hawk helicopters, equipment, trained pilots and Special Forces -- to the film.

Quote:

"We wanted to show what soldiers encounter in modern warfare, whether it's in Somalia or Afghanistan," says Kathleen Carham Ross of the Army's public affairs office in Los Angeles.

Bruckheimer told the DOD when he was making "Pearl Harbor," another controversial historical film, that he was planning to make "Black Hawk." Before lending support, the Pentagon requested its usual early script review.

"We care if the project is historical, if it's accurate in its depiction of the Army," Ross says. "Obviously there are some scripts that, just by looking at, we know we can't support, like ones where the Army is in the employ of the Devil."

But the Army was already very familiar with Bowden's book, which is often used as a Special Forces training text. Before filming began, the Army trained actors with the 75th Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning, Ga., and in a commando program with the 7th Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C. Some went through the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment helicopter training program at Fort Campbell, Ky.

Boot-camp training for actors in war films is now de rigueur, but "Black Hawk" technical adviser Harry Humphries, a veteran of Bruckheimer's movies, said the training actors went through at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg was the most extensive he's ever seen.

Getting those 65-foot-long Black Hawks, pilots to fly them and guards to protect them in Morocco was a special operation in itself. Arranging for the deployment of arms, equipment and actual U.S. troops to establish what would be, to outward appearance, a working U.S. military base in Morocco for 92 days of filming meant intense negotiations involving the State Department, the Pentagon and the Moroccan Foreign Ministry.

Two down-to-the-wire days before the crucial "insertion" scene was to be filmed, two C-5 transport planes landed near Rabat carrying eight choppers (four Black Hawks and four Little Birds), pilots from the 160th SOAR and more than 100 soldiers from Bravo Company of the 75th Ranger Regiment's 3rd Battalion -- the same company that had fought in Mogadishu.

The bill from the Pentagon: $2.2 million, a small bite of the film's total $90 million budget. The money the studio paid covered the use of the equipment, choppers, transportation, maintenance and repair, as well as the troops' lodging and meals. "They even paid their laundry costs," Ross says.

And the actual military operation made us look like idiots. The movie made us look like scrappy badasses.