Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Surviving Black Hawk Down' On Netflix, Where Americans And Somalis Recall The Deadly 1993 Battle Of Mogadishu

Yahoo

11-02-2025

Surviving Black Hawk Down is a three-part docuseries, directed by Jack MacInnes and produced by Ridley Scott Associates, where people who were involved in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia talk about that fateful time. The Battle of Mogadishu is better known in the U.S. as the 'Black Hawk Down incident,' where Somali fighters downed three Black Hawk helicopters and fought Army Rangers and Delta Force soldiers tooth and nail for two days. In all, 18 American soldiers died, as well as hundreds of Somalis, in the worst losses the U.S. military had suffered since the Vietnam War. The battle was fictionalized for Scott's 2001 film Black Hawk Down.
Opening Shot: We see the neon-clad outside of a diner. Inside, a man sits down at a booth. 'So Dave, October 3, 1993,' the director says. 'A long time ago,' says Dave.
The Gist: In the series, MacInnes not only speaks to members of the Rangers and Delta Force for the series, but he also speaks to Somalis who were fighting the U.S. forces. Deployed at first as part of a U.N. peacekeeping mission and an effort to help with the famine that was a result of Somalia's civil war, the U.S. military's mission changed in mid-1993 to try to take out General Mohammed Farah Aidid, head of the Somali National Alliance.
On October 3, 1993, Delta Force, supported by the Rangers, went on a mission in Mogadishu to take out some of Adid's lieutenants. What ended up happening was that fighting was fierce, despite ragtag nature of the Somali insurgents and freedom fighters, for the simple reason that support had solidified behind Adid after air raids by the U.S. killed dozens of civilians.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As we mentioned, the docuseries takes its lead from the film Black Hawk Down, but it also is reminiscent of the recent Apple TV+ docuseries Vietnam: The War That Changed America.Our Take: Surviving Black Hawk Down is an engaging docuseries because it goes over the Battle of Mogadishu in an amount of detail that most people have never been exposed to before. Even if you remember the Black Hawk Down incident, especially the horrifying footage of freedom fighters dragging the body of a dead U.S. soldier through the streets of the city, or if you saw Scott's 2001 film, you likely don't have much of a recall about what led up to this battle or even why U.S. forces were in Somalia in the first place.
MacInnes uses the interviews, archival footage and well-staged reenactments to put viewers in the middle of the fight. Through his interviews with Rangers and Delta Force members, we got context on how they came to their particular assignments, how young many of the Rangers truly were, and how utterly confident-to-the-point-of-cockiness they were going into these missions. On the other hand, the balance of hearing from the Somalis that fought against a country that they quickly saw as an invaders rather than humanitarians gives us a good picture of how they were able to fight so fiercely and bring down the three Black Hawks, despite not having the training or weaponry the Americans had.
The first episode leads to the downing of the Black Hawks, while the remaining two episodes go into what happened after that, including the attempted rescues of the Black Hawk occupants that survived the crashes, as well as the media spectacle around the failed mission. What we hope the series discusses is how the failure in Somalia affected U.S. foreign policy during Bill Clinton's presidency, including the U.S. staying out of the genocide in Rwanda.
We also hope there might be at least some insight into why it doesn't seem that we were able to take lessons from Vietnam, where a motivated force prevailed over the U.S. Hearing some of the soldiers and how they recounted the battle, they definitely felt like they felt they had the skills and tech to overwhelm a group they thought was ragtag and unorganized. Even 31 years later, their surprise at the fierceness of the fight was apparent.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: 'This is going bad, quick,' says one of the Delta Force soldiers about the situation after the first Black Hawk went down.Sleeper Star: We'll give this to every one of the Somalis that talked for the docuseries. It's refreshing to see their viewpoint of the battle.Most Pilot-y Line: While we generally rail against reenactments, the ones in this series are very well-done, so no complaint from us.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Surviving Black Hawk Down gives viewers details to a battle that is still remembered but whose context has pretty much faded in the last three decades.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn't kid himself: he's a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.