PAUL GOLDSMITH, peering through the infernal bluish haze of the cinematic version of Mogadishu's 'battle from Hell,' was saddened but not surprised to find the Americans taking on SPLA fighters wearing black hats.

Things began to wrong from the start; four US helicopters were hit, two them going down in the urban maze inhabited by the warlord’s Habr Gedir clan militia. The would-be hostage-takers tried to rescue the crews only to find themselves trapped and on their own. 

When the sun rose the next day, there were 18 Americans and hundreds of Somalis dead. 

In 1999, Philadelpia Enquirer journalist Marc Bowden published a rigorously researched and gripping account of the Mogadishu rumble entitled Black Hawk Down. When I heard in November 2001 that British director Ridley Scott was turning the book into a movie bearing the same name, I assumed the film would set the record straight about the battle Somalis refer to as ma alanti Ranga – day of the Rangers – and the fateful events directly responsible for immobilising the international community when the genocide in Rwanda began several months later. 

After all, Ridley Scott had just won the Oscar for best picture for his latest film, Gladiator. In this film, like in his science-fiction masterpiece, Blade Runner, Scott's understated approach to moral dilemma reinvigorated a tired Hollywood film genre. His track record, and Bowden’s presence on location in Morocco as an advisor, encouraged my expectations that the movie would be faithful to the account carried in the book. 

The first indication that the film had a different agenda was the rush to move forward the release date following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York.

Another sour note came in the form of news that a mutual acquaintance contracted to supply military materials for the movie had left the Morocco location prematurely and pissed off. The film was released, and then came the reactions. 

A colleague who saw the movie in the US described Black Hawk Down as "a whole lot of shooting – about what I was not exactly sure." A Somali advocacy organisation in Minnesota called for a boycott of the movie because it depicted the Somalis as "savage beasts shooting each other" and reinforced "negative perceptions following the September 11 terrorist attacks."

Aideed’s former cohort, Osman Atto, said he was considering suing because the film makers mis-portrayed him without permission: "Yes, I was imprisoned by the US military at the time, but unlike in the movie, I was never kept in chains!" 

Jeff Koinange’s BBC report on local reactions after a bootleg version of the movie premiered in Mogadishu mirrored with Donald McHenry’s coverage of the same in the New York Times.

Criticism of the film itself was relatively muted, and tended to reflect how the movie reawakened their feelings about the actual events.

McHenry notes the linkage when some youths reacted to his presence by covering their faces. "They do not want to be seen by an American," a security guard explained. "They are afraid of bombing. The last time Americans came here, first came the journalists, then the soldiers. In the beginning, it was peace. Then they began to kill us."

Such mild sentiments by Somali standards suggested that perhaps the film did not significantly stray from Bowden’s account, which, after all, described in intimate detail the long running battle in the streets of Mogadishu.

If the battle is mainly seen through an American lens, the general picture conveyed by Black Hawk Down the book is balanced by Bowden’s conscientious effort to include Somali reportage as well. 

The great strength of the book is Bowden’s use of multiple diverse sources to both corroborate written accounts and the narratives offered by soldiers he interviewed, and to establish the larger context of ma alanti Ranga.

His notes on these sources are interesting on their own. Bowden makes the chaotic sequence of events come alive by tapping into the experience of the actors for whom their presence in "the Mog" didn’t make much sense.

He scopes the mood of the bored soldiers before the mission, and captures their quandary when things suddenly spin out of control. 

The mission went off the tracks when Rear Admiral Howe became obsessed with capturing the nefarious warlord, Mohammed Farah Aideed.

When this proved difficult, Howe got the UN to approve the Aideed "dead or alive" policy, which prompting the attack on a meeting of Aideed's clan elders on July 12.

The TOW missile that killed 79 members of the clan’s de facto Senate was tantamount to a declaration of war on the Habr Gedr. 

The book is rich in good raw material for Ridley Scott, the moral of the story clear and unambiguously framed in Bowden’s retelling of this battle from Hell.

So I was still optimistic when, quite unexpectedly, I found myself in a friend’s house in Nairobi’s Somali-dominated Eastleigh neighbourhood, a bootleg cassette of Black Hawk Down on pause until the prerequisite wad of khat was in our jaws. 

The cassettes rent out for Ksh50 (64 US cents) in Eastleigh; the print was poor. We watched the battle unfold in a bluish haze. Maybe this is how the Mog appeared after dark to the Rangers, who erroneously assumed their night vision goggles would not be needed. Perhaps this influenced my impressions of the film, why the Habr Gedr could have passed for the SPLA, and the music’s Sahelian-Morrocan sound. 

The contribution of the warlords to the humanitarian mission gone awry is well known; the film’s opening sequence faithfully features Atto, who looked like Idi Amin, warning Howe that this is not your battle, to stay out of it, and to go home. 

There are aerial shots of a cramped coastal city, we see Rangers inspecting the arsenals for sale in the souk.

The foreplay is otherwise brief. Pre-battle build up is limited to Howe verbally crowning bad guy Aideed with black hat, and a conversation between a young soldier who believes America is here "to do the right thing" and a veteran who caustically replies, "I was trained to fight."

The rest of the movie consists of a whole lot of shooting–about what is not exactly clear if you did not read the book.

• Dr Paul Goldsmith is a researcher based in Meru, Kenya