Don't turn to Ridley Scott's stunning "Black Hawk Down" for lectures on geopolitics, the tarnished Clinton foreign-policy legacy or theories of terrorist conspiracy. The movie reflects not a public intellectual's view of the world, but Sgt. "Hoot" Hooten's. Hoot's the guy with the M-16 who doesn't make decisions but only tries to survive them.

The movie, then, may disappoint pundits and op-ed cowboys and all the men in gray suits and black shoes who so self-confidently throng this city's streets over the lunch hour. It teaches stuff they don't know, only the smallest and most bitter of lessons: that ammunition is more important than water, that cover is more important than concealment, and that the good die young.

"Black Hawk Down" re-creates war at the micro level, as experienced by Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos on the ground in Mogadishu, Somalia, Oct. 3, 1993. On that day, a routine if dangerous mission slated to last an hour fell apart in the worst possible way. The young soldiers found themselves the targets of what can only be described as a citywide homicidal rage, in which every angry Somali with a Soviet-bloc assault rifle or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher petitioned his grievance in lead and warheads.

The soldiers, initially deployed to represent their country's humanitarian instincts toward famine relief, had by this time become policemen, hunting a powerful warlord who usurped United Nations food supply efforts. Now they found themselves in a pitched battle. For 15 hours they sheltered in the ruins of the city, scampered to consolidate, rescue their wounded and collect their dead, shot at everything that was shooting at them, and prayed for deliverance.

When it finally arrived early the next morning, 18 Americans and an estimated 1,000 Somalis were dead and the city had been turned into a warscape resembling Stalingrad. It was the worst single day of combat for American soldiers since the Vietnam War, and even if the job the young men had been sent to do was accomplished, that achievement - in the way these things always seem to go - turned out to be largely meaningless.

You may be impelled to ask: What was the point? But you probably won't have time while the film is onscreen. The movie doesn't moralize, and its political meanings may be arrived at only by laborious inference. It's too intense to let the rational part of your brain gear up; instead, you are simply there, scurrying, ducking, wishing you had more ammunition, luck or courage, and wishing the whole thing would end. You come out shaking and weak.

Shot in Morocco with an unusual amount of Pentagon cooperation, "Black Hawk Down" re-creates the events of that day with the full technical resources of modern cinematic technique. It helps to have a few Black Hawk helicopters to play with, of course, and a $90 million budget, a Pico Boulevard club-full of hot young actors and, in the role of the Somali militia, the Royal Moroccan Army. But it's still possible to have all that and screw it up; Scott, an experienced big-movie maker ("Gladiator," for example, wasn't too shabby in the size department) tries to keep the phony movie moments to a minimum and the sense of frantic professionalism to a maximum. It works.

Task Force Ranger's mission - to arrest two men said to be the warlord's lieutenants in a building in a teeming market district - seemed to go well enough at the start. As planned, the Delta commandos, choppered in by small helicopters, assaulted the building and "extracted" the men; the Rangers, arriving minutes later in heavier Black Hawk helicopters, fast-roped down and set up a perimeter. Meanwhile a lightly armored convoy headed through the city to rendezvous with them and take everybody back to base three miles away.

But - spontaneously, it seems - the city's militia rallied and began to bring fire on the hated Americans; the whole thing went south when one, then another, of the big Ranger helicopters were shot down, and troops had to be diverted to the crash sites. Each one became an Alamo or a Little Round Top as the Americans took up defensive positions while rescue convoys attempted to reach them.

So focused on the experience of the fighting is "Black Hawk Down" that it doesn't bother much with context or with character, something that could never be said of reporter Mark Bowden's original book. Bowden took the time to explain not merely the politics involved but, more important, the culture of the new, volunteer Army.

There's not a whiff of Vietnam-era sullenness and resentment; these aren't draftees but volunteers, in it for the fun, travel and adventure. They aspire to be, or are, solid professionals; they don't see themselves as victims but as warriors. They are gung-ho, Number One, and RA (regular army) all the way.

But they weren't interchangeable; there were essentially two American military cultures on the streets of the Mog that day, and while Scott evokes them visually, he never explains them. The Rangers are shock infantry, basically conventional in all military respects; their hair is trimmed or shaved, their ranks low, their ages young (most are in their first enlistment). An institutional vanity requires that they bark "HOOOO-AGH!" in place of "Yes, sir" or "Yes, Sergeant." Most "want action" or joined to fight; they're full of the bravado of a JV football team on its first road trip.

The Deltas, or D-boys, are all senior noncommissioned officers, heavily trained and armed, who've seen a lot of action in our little wars of recent note. They are in their late twenties and early thirties. They are not just Special Forces but the elite of the already elite Special Forces; so they are stars, and used to being treated like stars. They have a lot of little perks, too, and like so many gifted men, they know their talent buys them extra latitude even in a bureaucratic empire as chronically anal as the American military. They wear their hair long, they dispense with conventional military courtesy, they have customized weapons, and they wear plastic bike helmets instead of the steel pots of the Rangers. And in action they are, by training and instinct, very, very aggressive.

It's the strategy of Scott (and the several screenwriters who toiled on the script, including Bowden) to play up that big brother/little brother relationship between men of each unit; it provides an emotional subtext to what otherwise might be simple chaos, spectacle and things blowing up. Each grown-up Delta will "adopt" a baby Ranger, and nurse him through the conflict with words of encouragement or chastisement. Each boy will try to please his big brother, and in the end, that, more than any exhortations to duty and country, is what gets them through the night.

As an exercise in star charisma, the movie is fascinating. All the guys end up with dirty faces and big moments, but only a few of them connect with the audience. Josh Hartnett plays an earnest young Ranger staff sergeant named Matt Eversmann, and he's essentially the sensitive one, in whose burning, tender eyes the full horrors of the conflagration are mirrored. He's not bad, and Hartnett may in fact become the big star everyone expects.

Still, others register far more powerfully, and some people disappear altogether. Eric Bana, the Australian actor of last year's "Chopper," will probably be promoted from Sgt. First Class "Hoot" Hooten to full-fledged movie star. Affecting a believable Southern accent, he's Hartnett's big brother; but he's so cool in his swagger, toughness and professionalism - and he has all the good lines - that he's the one you'll remember.

Meanwhile, William Fichtner, who's been a yeoman for years, has a great role as another Delta pro, Master Sgt. Paul Howe (Bowden's primary source on Delta operations for the book). Fichtner is really good: tough and smart and gritty. But his little brother, Ewan McGregor, as a company clerk elevated to assistant machine-gunner at the last moment, all but vaporizes. You forget McGregor - no less than Obi Wan Kenobi! - is even in the movie until the end, and then you realize he's actually been in most of the scenes.

The stunner is Tom Sizemore. Sizemore, who always appears as working-class stalwarts with doughy faces, dead eyes and imperturbable psychology, plays a Ranger colonel in charge of the rescue convoy. His calm dignity and endless well of courage are breathtaking. When a boy says to him, "Sir, I've been wounded," he replies quietly, "Son, we've all been wounded." It's as if he's still the platoon sergeant Mike Horvath from "Saving Private Ryan," commissioned, grown older and wiser.

There are some disappointments. The two Delta snipers Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon, both posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for their sacrifice (they set up security around one of the downed Black Hawks and stood off hundreds of militiamen until eventually overwhelmed) are only seen in their brilliant action. They are not established as characters in the early going, and we have no sense of them as men, so we don't feel the pang of their loss as much as we should.

And while Scott largely resists Hollywood-ifying the material, he doesn't do so entirely. I didn't care for the way two of the Somali generals were personalized by their shades and gangsta outfits, and the way the camera delivered up their eventual demise with a sense of melodramatic payback. Take that, sucka! It seems beneath the movie. One of them even lectures a downed helicopter pilot in rhetoric that sounds like something Richard Loo would have said as an evil Japanese colonel to John Garfield in a 1943 Warner Bros. morale-booster.

But those cavils aside, "Black Hawk Down" is the next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

BLACK HAWK DOWN (R, 144 minutes) - contains intense battle violence, including sheared limbs and bodies. At area theaters.