Review: ’13 Hours’

The words subtlety and nuance do not come to mind when thinking of the movies of Michael Bay; on the contrary, he has a style so bombastically singular that it has become known as Bayhem, and the application of this style of filmmaking to certain topics seems, on the surface, ridiculous. A “Michael Bay war movie” is one of these instances, and it does not help that he already bungled a World War II movie, so when it was announced that he was making the 2012 Benghazi attack film “13 Hours,” it seemed like a bad call from the start.

And lo and behold it was a bad call, because “13 Hours” is the kind of movie that your racist uncle, who never served a day of military service in his life, will insist everyone else see because it tells “the truth” about what happened, a one-sided telling of a very intense night, a confirmation of a political bias that Michael Bay never intended, and that dumb uncle of yours will ignore the seven congressional investigations and thirty-two hearings and instead will hold this up as what really happened in that land which he couldn’t find on a map (here it is, next to Egypt).

And if you think that’s an exaggeration, check out these responses from some audience members at the premiere held at a football stadium with 30,000 attendees. Because America.

So why is this problematic? It’s just an action movie, a war story told to honor the people who fought and died in said story, who cares if it has a slathering of Bayhem all over it? Because this is the kind of story that suffers when the politics are “removed.” It starts with a few opening credits simply stating, “The US, the UK and France bombed Lybia, and the Lybian people killed Gaddafi. In-fighting ensues.” This just skips over a whole civil war, which itself was fall out from another revolutionary movement, and these stories are just as compelling, if not more so, but we’ll go ahead and skip it all because “politics blegh.”

Enter our Real American Heroes, led by Jim from The Office because how can you NOT see that when you look at his face? I don’t care how big of a beard he grows or how tough he tries to look, he’s always that guy from that sitcom where everyone looked at the camera whenever exasperated and/or confused. So Jim from The Office meets up with other Alpha Males With Beards And Guns, and they shack up at a secret CIA compound in Benghazi, Lybia; they are the bodyguards for the spies, pretty much. And they all hate each other because it’s a movie folks, not real life. Also important to note – the story is based on a book written with the help and from the perspective of these bodyguards, so in this movie what happens is that we have a group of guys who are never wrong, always do the right thing, and are surrounded by complete incompetence from every level. Oh, and they are dedicated family men. This must be mentioned here because it comes up over and over in this movie. “13 Hours” features more half-crying beardos sobbing into phones and laptops than any other war-based movie ever.

First off, according to this movie, the CIA employees working at this secret base are a bunch of prissy Ivy League know-nothings and who undervalue the importance of their security detail. We see our Real American Heroes being told to sit in the corner and shut up while the grown ups work, their contributions and expertise immediately and arrogantly dismissed. And in case you don’t get the tension between the “real” men and the fat CIA dickhead, there are multiple scenes of this dummy getting in these guys faces and telling them off, which would be absurd because they are in Lybia and shit is popping outside of those walls. But this guy is like “just chill cause we don’t need you, brah.” And then Jim from The Office looks at the camera and he’s all like “… .”

A group of Islamic militants decide to attack the US Ambassador when he’s in town, which just happened to be on September 11, and this is where the “lack of politics” disclaimer from Michael Bay just doesn’t cut it because this movie claims to be based on a true story, and despite being from the guy who brought us “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” people will take the claim on its face (see: your racist uncle). So when this movie shows the CIA base director specifically telling Jim from The Office and the rest of the security detail to stand down and not head over to the ambassador and try to save him (which was only a mile away, mind you), and then shows them decide to go anyway as if in direct defiance of the CIA, this just happens to be in opposition to what those 2,780 questions, $20 million, and 70,000 pages of documents uncovered, which was the lack of evidence to prove a  “stand down” order was given. But “13 Hours” has this little guy getting up in this big dude’s face yelling “Staaand down! Staaaaaaand doooooown!” and who the hell do you think ole Joe Sixpack is gonna believe? 11 published reports based on millions of dollars worth of congressional investigations, or “the secret soldiers of Benghazi.”

Meanwhile, back here in non-Michael Bay directed reality, the retired CIA base chief who was actually there explains that he did not tell these men to stand down and did not forbid them from going to the embassy to save the ambassador. Instead he told these guys they could go but first they should wait so he could see if he could get other local forces like the local police to head over there, and after twenty minutes when they could not secure any sort of back up, the security guys headed over, and unfortunately by then it was too late. So basically the exact opposite of what happens in this movie. The one your racist uncle who also shows his misogynist side when talking about Hillary Clinton will talk about at the next family reunion. And if you don’t think this movie will be used as a political bludgeon in any way, rest assured that FOX News has already done so.

The major problem with the “removal of politics” in this movie, however, relates to the lack of nuance used to sketch out these characters. The Americans are either the uber-capable family men with beards and guns, or they are the too-smart-for-their-own-good CIA assholes, or they are naive like the ambassador. Which then leaves all the brown folks in the movie, you know, the Libyans who actually live there, and of course they are all completely untrustworthy, and again almost entirely incompetent and cowardly to boot. There are maybe five Libyans total who help the Americans, but they barely help at all. Otherwise every brown skinned person in this movie is totally suspect, including the women and children. We are told over and over by this movie that we can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, which then by default makes everyone bad, until they can prove they are good at least. And of course they hammer home the fact that the bad guys are Islamist insurgents, with the morning call to prayer being presented as something ominous and foreign and foreboding, because if there is something we need in this country is another piece of our media painting the picture of America vs Islam, that’s really going to make things so much better around the world.

You see, Hollywood made a surplus of World War I and World War II movies because those were wars that people could get behind, especially when something as evil and fucked up as the Nazi War Machine had to be taken on. So all of these War movies were easy to make and easy to watch because it was good vs evil, with the evil clearly being the other countries. But then Vietnam came around and that was much more muddled and less “rah rah go America” and as such people couldn’t get behind it in the same way, and the movies made about this war reflect that. Instead of cheering on American soldiers as they kill the Vietcong, we got movies about Vietnam War vets struggling both during the war and afterwards when they came home. The recent Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, along with our new and nebulous War on Terror, resulted in the same thing at first – movies that took on the government and questioned these wars and showed what happened to the soldiers who went over and fought and came back with serious emotional (and often physical) scarring. So we got movies like “Stop Loss” and “In The Valley of Elah” and “The Hurt Locker” and none of these morally conflicted movies made any money at the box office.

But when the “politics are removed” and we get War on Terror movies that exist to merely celebrate the American combatants, we get box office hits; “Lone Survivor” made $125 million in US theater ticket sales and “American Sniper” made $350 million and neither of these movies questioned the conflicts or the reasons for them and instead draped themselves in Americana and proclaimed themselves to be stories of heroes. According to these successful movies, these wars exist in a vacuum and our involvement as a country is not something to be questioned because the soldiers don’t question it, they just get their assignments and show up where they are told to and kill anyone who tries to kill them. And frankly this is some really disingenuous bullshit because if our country’s government will send these people to kill and be killed in the name of the Stars and Stripes, the reasoning for this should be examined and explored as well, and we as the TV-watching, movie-going public should not turn our backs on these reasons either and we should not be pretending this shit doesn’t exist. Decades of American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and Northern Africa, have directly led to these wars and to these deaths and ignoring them and only venerating the actions of the men and women who fought and died is nothing more than pro-government and pro-war propaganda. We are told that these are “real heroes” and we are shunned if we dare to question their actions for even a moment because our heroes are always right by virtue of being American. The soldiers are not the policy makers, they are merely the enforcers, and we should respect them and love them for the job they do without even thinking about WHY they are doing this job. So at the end of the day, something like “13 Hours” works as US agitprop and nothing more. It is supposed to be a testament to these guys who did their best to keep fellow Americans alive, but it only does this by ignoring why these Americans were there in the first place.

As such, this exclusion of politics can really be seen only as capitulation to the guilt of the country and the American public. Movie goers have already told Hollywood, via ticket sales, that they are not interested in movies that explore what went wrong, or why we are in this mess to begin with, and so Hollywood green lights movies that merely venerate the soldiers, recalling the glory days of John Wayne led war movies in which the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad and there is no question about any of this. This is a direct result of our nation’s guilt about our policies and the imbroglio that started with Reagan in the 1980s and was actually building prior to that with our government’s meddling with other governments and then which was exacerbated with those wonderful eight years in which George Bush and Dick Cheney spent trillions of our dollars to get us bogged down in a quagmire while all of their business cohorts raked in billions of dollars in government contracts related to the manufacturing of weapons as well as the acquisition of Middle Eastern oil reserves. This isn’t simply fighting murderous Nazis. This is total avarice, which the average citizen is paying for via both tax dollars and peace of mind, and we want out and we can’t get out because we are locked in this obviously eternal War on Terror. So we as  nation feel guilty about what our government does and we don’t want it reflected in our war-based art and as such it has been taken out and now we have bullshit like “13 Hours,” in which the enemy is a combination of scary brown people and simple bureaucratic incompetence at the highest levels of government. When congressional hearings determined that air support could not be provided by the US because the nearest military bases were simply too far away to be of any assistance, “13 Hours” presents this as the government refusing to provide support, with one CIA person telling one of the security guys that she tried to get air support but she couldn’t secure it, which is then followed by a shot of US war planes sitting on a tarmac somewhere, not being manned. The visual indictment of the current administration couldn’t be louder. And yet “politics were removed” from this story. Sure they were, Michael Bay and writer Chuck Hogan, sure they were.

So the Bayhem is bullshit, especially in this context. When filmmakers claim to remove the politics from their war movies, you should become immediately suspect of said movie, and then you can also sit back and watch people insert their own politics into the voided space.

Oh and of course this is a Michael Bay movie so the action is spectacular as well as pummeling in both the best and worst ways, the dialogue is on the nose and devoid of subtext, and you can spot who is gonna die from a mile away when a character takes a photo of his family and sticks it in his bullet proof vest because Michael Bay presents his art with the subtlety of a mega-ton nuclear weapon blowing up an anthill. He should definitely stick to movies about giant robots from outer space.