Celluloid Somalia. (In the Mix).

At the beginning of Black Hawk Down, the audience reads that Plato believed only the dead know the end of war. But Ridley Scott thinks he knows the end of war. His movie will promote a strong sense of nationalism and fuel revenge fantasies for the military, which aided in its making. But more importantly for him, it will generate a cache of Oscar nominations and higher foreign distribution rights.

Scott's Black Hawk Down is a first-class war film. Ever the auteur, Scott tops Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan in creating a hellish cinematic landscape illuminated by tracer bullets and explosions, littered with body parts, painted by the blood and flesh of Americans and Somalis. But only the Americans are cast in a sacred light. The residents of Mogadishu are one-dimensional characters in their own country: either crazed gunmen indiscriminately shooting at anyone, or noble savages to be pitied. When the Somalis speak, and it's almost always to Americans, it's with a stomach-turning callousness that feels fakey and racist.

The movie opens with a little background. We are told that 300,000 Somalis---derisively referred to as "skinnies" by American troops--have already died in a civil war. The Marines landed in 1992 to restore order in Mogadishu and make sure food shipments got to the people. Things quieted down. The Marines left, and the warlords returned. In 1993, President Clinton sent in U.S. Army Rangers and members of the Delta Force to try and capture Mohammed Farah Aidid. Scott illustrates Aidid's brand of realpolitik when his troops brazenly, and in front of a U.S. helicopter, gun down starving people at a makeshift food distribution site. This is Aidid's food, and Aidid's war, we are meant to understand.

This scene sets the stage for what is to unfold in a fifteen-hour battle that took the lives of eighteen U.S. soldiers and approximately 1,000 Somalis, some of whom were probably civilians because Aidid's men didn't have the courtesy to wear uniforms like many of this country's previous adversaries. Scott's style puts you in the battle. You feel the moments of insecurity and lack of clarity, where eighteen-year-olds go from high school to jump school and into the street. They're led by middle-aged men, grounded in procedures and process, steeped in duty and honor, and they, too, have to make decisions that have far-reaching political ramifications.

Staff Sergeant Eversmann (Josh Hartnett), ostensibly the protagonist of the film, is an idealistic Ranger who believes he and his comrades are in Somalia to make a difference. At the end of the battle, after Eversmann processes what he has witnessed and the adrenaline subsides, a grizzled Delta Force veteran tells him the only real reason to fight is to protect each other.

This is an effective bit of truth at the micro-level, but it loses its steam as we pull away from the streets of Mogadishu and ask a basic question: "How did Somalia get this way? How did Aidid become the monster?" Well, apparently, we're not meant to know the truth. As Ian Urbina of the Middle East Research and Information Project has noted, there is no discussion of the IMF's austerity measures in the 1980s. No discussion of Washington's $50 million annual arms shipments to Somali dictator Siad Barre, who then sold part of the stash of weapons to other factions. Or that three months prior to the downing of the Black Hawks, two Cobra helicopters fired missiles and bullets into a gathering of elders of Aidid's clan, who, ironically, were gathered together to discuss a peace plan laid out by the U.S.

After September 11, the Bush Administration asked that the opening be moved up several months, but it would be facile to believe the movie is a government conspiracy. This is a highly stylized action film that glorifies the fighter. That's where the money is. Despite all the obvious nods to classic war films--from the graceful aerial scenes and surreal moments of muddy perception in Apocalypse Now to the band-of-brothers sentimentality expressed in Hamburger Hill and Full Metal Jacket--Scott manages his biggest jabs at fuzzy intelligence gathering, the impotent U.N., and politically naive do-gooders in the Clinton Administration. Scott's message to the American people and to soldiers is simple: The fault is with bad bureaucrats, bad planning, and fuzzy goals. The military doesn't build nations. It isn't a police force. If you don't want ugly, don't send them.

And, yet, Scott says he has directed an apolitical film.

This all wouldn't be such a frightening mess if it weren't for September 11. Now we're being told that the rockets used to fell two Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia were sent by none other than Osama bin Laden. CNN has already featured a story on how Somalis at the premiere in Mogadishu cheered when U.S. soldiers died. Black Hawk Down may inspire some hero-happy teenagers sign up for the next war. They'd rather fly to heaven than to Oslo. Who remembers Nobel Prize winners anyway?

If Plato meant that war's only lesson is death, then Danis Tanovic seems to have gotten it. His No Man's Land manages to excoriate all parties involved in the war between Bosnians and the Serbs.

Cera, a Bosnian soldier knocked unconscious during an ambush, wakes up on a sunny afternoon in 1993 to find himself lying in a trench in the middle of the Bosnian-Serbian front. He's there with his friend Ciki and an enemy, a Serbian soldier named Nino. Cera is also lying on a spring-loaded mine, placed beneath him by a Serbian soldier who thought he was dead. If he moves, the mine will spring three feet into the air, explode, and spray enough ball bearings to obliterate anyone within a 500-foot radius.

In the process of attempting to kill each other, Ciki and Nino draw the attention of both sides, which call in U.N. peacekeepers for assistance. Sergeant Marchand, a French soldier and a frustrated idealist who finds it hard to remain neutral in the face of murder, moves his team to the trench, not knowing what they'll find. Instead of being able to aid the three, Marchand is ordered back to the safe zone. The French soldiers leave, and tensions only get worse between Ciki and Nino, each wounding the other in small melees.

On the way out, Marchand is ambushed by a British journalist who had been monitoring radio transmissions and knows the situation. She threatens to expose the U.N.'s "nonintervention" course. Marchand exploits this turn of events in an effort to save the three, but in so doing he creates a media circus in the battlefield.

Tanovic captures both the absurdity and the ferocity of this war. He has the good sense to avoid pretending that war is a heroic adventure that shuttles boys into manhood, distinguishes between the brave and the weak, and separates good from evil. And in so doing, Tanovic pricks the viewer for buying into violence of any kind.

Fred McKissack Jr. is Associate Editor of The Progressive.