Went to see the movie 13 Hours (subtitle: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi). This is the Michael Bay directed true account (maybe) of the attack on the American consulate and secret CIA base in Benghazi, Libya back in 2012. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? I hear some people are making a lot of political hay about it.
But the thing is, the movie largely does not make political hay out of the events. It never specifically points fingers at any one person or politician. I think if you bring with you a particular political persuasion, you’ll get the movie you expect to see. I’m not sure if this movie is accurate to the events on the ground or at least accurate to the book its based on… there could be a bunch of Hollywood moments in it. But I’ll say this much for Michael Bay: for a man who has never made an action flick that I liked, this is easily his best and most mature movie.
Whatever the political motivations of the movie or what you might bring in with you, this is, divorced of the real world, a good action / war movie. It’s very tense, very solid, and very thrilling. And very coherent visually with a lot of down time between fire fights to ratchet up the tension and camaraderie.
The movie does go for over-simplification in that it promotes the soldiers as the smartest, most honest guys in the story. The CIA analysts were political hacks or just pencil-neck geeks who would die without our stalwart (mercenary) soldiers. Maybe that’s how it was but it did feel like a convenient Hollywood shortcut.
So there ya go… a movie that could have been a political minefield ended up being more of an endorsement of small team of soldiers in a bad situation. I really enjoyed it and, yes, I did go in expecting the worst and I did have a keen eye out for whether it was going to start bashing politicians on the way. Based on the audience I was with, I think they got out of it what they expected to get… but they mainly brought that in with them.
Score: 87