“Black Hawk Down” is simultaneously specific — one swooping military operation over the span of less than a day — and then broad — there is nothing here to differentiate this battle from any other in the post-World War II era.

Machine guns, tanks, grenades and foot soldiers: these have all been around for the wars of Spielberg and Stone, of Hawks and Sturges before them. Admittedly, the Black Hawk choppers are extraordinarily more advanced, but you’d never know that without reading about their cumulative $56 million price tag.

With this strategy, Ridley Scott’s take on modern day war may be the most efficient and moving to date in portraying “the way it is.” Scott doesn’t have the gaul nor the cojones to attempt something along the lines of “Platoon” or “Full Metal Jacket” which, with all due respect, took on the impossible by trying to explain or embody an entire war in the context of its generation. Instead, he picks a 24-hour period, one seemingly well-planned mission, and sticks to it.

The specific: A botched 1993 U.S. military measure that aimed to apprehend the top two lieutenants of Somalia’s ruling warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid. President Clinton ordered U.S. interference in what was beginning to look hauntingly like the genocide of Nazi Germany. With some U.N. help, we swooped into Mogadishu like big, black hawks out of the sky. Final count, according to the film’s credits: 18 dead U.S. troops and over 1,000 dead Somalian civilians and militants.

The broad: Confusion. Panic. Fear. These are the universal elements of any war, and although we always thought ground wars were things of the past, “Black Hawk Down” suggests otherwise. Oliver Stone was amongst the first to stray from the tough-guys of World War II-era film, and Charlie Sheen on the verge of tears in the trenches was effective to say the least.

But Scott takes this notion one hundred steps further. There is a sub-plot involving two American soldiers, separated from the group. One asks the other, “Were we supposed to go to the humvee? I thought they were supposed to come to us.” The scenes involving the two lost and confused soldiers grow amusing to the point where one’s backpack is shot and it lights up like a bag of fireworks.

Other scenes are simply ridiculous. An injured helicopter pilot fires upon a circling swarm of militants from within a downed Black Hawk’s metallic carcass, and — like Bruce Lee thwarting a hoard of attacking ninjas one at a time — he picks the attackers off one-by-bloody-one until the pile of bodies is so high he can barely fire over it.

Scott’s almost comical take on the brutal confusion of ground war in such a seemingly advanced age may surprise those who came for a war pic. This is a massive cluster-fuck, not a war. Scott may have made our generation’s “Great Dictator” in the trenches without even knowing it.

Or maybe he did? It’s a picture that does little more than explain the gut feeling of confusion, the panic, the disarray and the primitive intensity that embodies battle. But that’s enough.

On a far simpler level — one based purely on entertainment and enjoyment — Scott has done what one might have thought impossible. He has created a document of war so realistic (in comparison to the Hollywood backlot feel of “Pearl Harbor” and so forth) that one spends nearly the entire film distracted with questions like, “How did they get that location? Where did they get these people? And are we sure that this isn’t real?”

When a fuming mob of Somalian civilians and militants claims the still-breathing bodies from a downed Black Hawk and nearly tears them limb from limb, Scott’s combination of war-time inhumanity and realistic people and settings pays off. One has a hard time believing it’s not real, and thanks God Scott doesn’t show us what happened next.

As for the claim that the screenplay dodged a number of issues and compromised the integrity of the novel it was based on (Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down”) — phooey! The novel takes time to pity the frightened Somalians, terrified of the foreign, flying black machines swooping down on them, but with this aspect included the film wouldn’t work. Any attempt to even look into the mind of the enemy and this film doesn’t make enough money to cover craft service.

Instead, what we get is a film that makes us think twice about, and say an extra prayer for, the young boys we’re sending abroad this very day. There’s nothing this country could use more right now.

GRADE: A