'Movies that Explain the Week's Events'

In the debate over sending troops into Libya, even simply to protect humanitarian operations, skeptics constantly warn of a Black Hawk Down moment, invoking this film's title as short hand for the disastrous 1993 Battle of Mogadishu to highlight the risks attached to even a humanitarian mission in a distant land gripped by a civil war poorly understood by outsiders. In August of 1992, with Somalia in the grip of a deadly civil war, President George H.W. Bush ordered U.S. troops in to secure a humanitarian mission. But protecting humanitarian aid required confronting local warlords, and the mission began to morph into combat operation. In October 1993, a raid aimed at seizing the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid went horribly wrong, beginning with the downing of a Black Hawk helicopter by an RPG round fired from the ground. Over the next 24 hours, 19 Americans and more than 1,000 Somalis were killed in a nightmare of urban combat. Ridley Scott's vivid visualization of Mark Bowden's excellent book of the same title–which painstakingly reconstructs a catastrophic military mission–is both a stunning action film and the consummate tale of a military road to hell paved with the best intentions. Sure, Scott doesn't bother to investigate why the other side is fighting, but he could argue in his defense that the U.S. mission in Somalia made the same mistake.

Journalist Tony Karon, writing over at "Time" magazine's Global Spin Blog. Four other films make the cut.