I was dreading having to review all of Michael Bay’s Transformers films, but we’ve finally arrived at the one I was truly not looking forward to watching at all. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is Michael Bay’s entry into the subgenre of jingoistic, ripped-from-the-headlines thrillers that seemed to run rampant in the 2010s. Lone Survivor, Patriots Day, Deepwater Horizon, American Sniper, Sully, The 15:17 to Paris… Bay really wanted in on what Peter Berg1 and Clint Eastwood were doing, which was feeding directly into the “right-wing kooks watch movies too” content mill.
War thrillers have always been a part of Michael Bay’s creative mood board, though. One thing I’d initially neglected when talking about Pearl Harbor was that Bay was originally tapped to direct Saving Private Ryan for Steven Spielberg, only backing out because he couldn’t figure out a way into the story. He was also close to directing Black Hawk Down before Ridley Scott took it over. And we know Bay is all about the military, because they’re all over his Transformers movies. So 13 Hours finds Michael Bay working in a pretty comfortable wheelhouse, and with a budget of just $50 million, he knows he’s gotta produce something lean, mean, and directly to the point.
Which, of course, means 13 Hours runs 144 minutes, long enough to make it his seventh shortest movie (it’s tied with Transformers). But I’m used to these movies being needlessly bloated, so let’s not consider that a complaint at this point.
On the evening of September 11, 2012, Islamic militants launched an attack on a US diplomatic compound in the city of Benghazi, Libya. US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and Information Officer Sean “Vilerat” Smith died during the attack. Hours later, the same group launched a follow-up attack on a CIA facility one mile away. CIA contractors Tyrone “Rone” Woods and Glen Doherty were killed during the firefight as the on-site staff scrambled to shut down the site and evacuate.
13 Hours, based on Mitchell Zuckoff’s book of the same name, recounts the days leading up to the attack, focusing on the paramilitary team tasked with defending against the attack. Our main character here is Jack Silva (John Krasinski), arriving in Benghazi to join Global Response Staff as extra security for US Ambassador Stevens (Matt Letscher) following the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi the previous year. Jack’s best friend Rone (James Badge Dale) leads the team, which also includes a sniper named Boon (David Denman), who I’m really only mentioning because his character used to really hate Krasinski’s character when they were both on The Office.
There’s no reason to recount the plot from here because the outcome is a matter of public record and is still a dog whistle that right-wingers love to clutch their pearls over even twelve years later. But what I will say is that within that framework, Michael Bay tells that story on about as even a keel as one could hope for. 13 Hours doesn’t cast blame on any particular party for the attack other than the ones directly responsible. He even does a surprisingly decent job at painting the Libyans as a handful of warring factions: a handful of militants, a few sympathetic to the US, and the rest who just want to stay in and watch soccer, dammit.
When he’s trying his damnedest not to contend with the political minefield of the whole situation, 13 Hours is a pretty solid, occasionally thrilling little war movie. The attack on the CIA Annex is a great piece of action filmmaking, finding Bay working comfortably in his wheelhouse. Sweeping crane shots of the battlefield, aerial photography, night vision photography, Bay pulls out every trick in the book to make this as visceral and entertaining as possible. There’s even a bizarre throwback to one of the iconic effects shots from Pearl Harbor, as a mortar grenade shoots up, and the camera follows it on its journey back down, not unlike the torpedoes raining down on the US battleships at Pearl Harbor. Bay is just flexing at this point, though it seems pretty callous to use such a move to connect one tragedy to another purely to entertain us.
Of course, the question becomes “Should we be entertained by this?” It’s the same question that plagued my rewatch of Pain & Gain, only in this instance Bay isn’t asking us to laugh at or shake our heads at all the ridiculous happenings. We’re meant to empathize with the Americans caught in an unwinnable situation, and with the innocent Libyans caught in the crossfire between the Americans and Islamic militants. It’s supposed to tug at our heartstrings as we see all the GRS guys making phone calls to their loved ones the morning of the attack, as we know full well what’s coming. We’re even meant to feel anger and frustration when CIA operative Sona (Alexia Barlier) desperately radios for air support, only for Bay to smash cut to an airfield in Italy where no one is doing a damn thing.
I can’t help but look at this film and see Michael Bay trying to atone for Pearl Harbor. He follows the events about as closely as possible, without dipping into fictionalizing characters or inventing motivations. And the motivations the characters do have are simple and universal. Bay presents the events here as accurately as they have been recounted in the book. Any discrepancies can be explained away as people simply trying to cover their own asses. Chief Bob (David Costabile) initially refuses to let his men race to the Ambassador’s aid, holding them for at least twenty minutes before they defy his orders and go anyway. That’s the way it’s been reported, though after the movie came out the real life chief vehemently denied that it happened that way at all.
Michael Bay seems deeply invested in doing this event justice, which I genuinely respect. You can tell his heart is in the right place with this one, and that he’s taken the lessons of Pearl Harbor to heart. He’s invested almost to a fault, though, because in hewing so close to the facts and trying to be respectful, the movie often feels like a real slog to get through. Pushing nearly two and a half hours, and often delving into the events in gut-wrenching detail 13 Hours is by no means a fun watch. I appreciate the care and the craft that went into telling this story and getting it right. It’s a better film than I expected, given the circumstances, but… Well… We have Peter Berg so that Michael Bay doesn’t have to make movies like this.
NEXT TIME: Can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m actually looking forward to Transformers 5.
- Apparently Bay lobbied to direct Lone Survivor, though I will admit that’s based on hearsay.
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