As an American ambassador is killed during an attack at a US compound in Libya, a security team struggles to make sense out of the chaos.
Atmospheric is not the word that comes to mind when you think of Michael Bay’s movies, which are characterised as visually exciting, but fast-cutting images in the middle of crash-boom of machines. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi , doesn’t have long, wide-angle takes but it does give us a moody picture of the capital of the failed state of Libya. And the jerky camera movements that suggest paranoia in the American outpost in a land where anything can go awry at any moment, giving us a tense, vibrant visual tour of the place.
Unfortunately, it’s the only good thing about Bay’s new film that is an unusual turn in his filmography. Leaving that aside, 13 Hours is every bit boring as most American films that have rightfully earned the tag of a ‘terrorpolitation’. The characters don’t chest-pump their nationalistic emotions, but they are an explicit embodiment of American masculinity: dudes with big, messy beards, aviators and machine guns strut around.
We are meant to empathise with them through their family backstories: of them talking to their wives and children over video calls, a narrative device so hackneyed that our brains have stopped responding to it. Although it runs two hours 24 minutes, it feels almost as long as 13 hours.
But unlike the other English release of this week, London has Fallen , that falls in the same zone as this one in terms of its hyper-American perspective about terrorism, 13 Hours doesn’t pretend that it’s trying to understand ‘enemies’ of the US Forces. The film is throughout from the point of view of the US soldiers on duty there, often, the images through their infrared viewfinders and CCTV footages become the images we see. When you are making a movie about how brave American soldiers, which they are, not taking away anything from the misfortune of the attack, survive a large-scale ambush in an anarchic alien country, you ought to show the motivations and context of the Islamists, how their realities are. If camera is said to be the God that captures a transcendental truth, 13 hours shows it faithfully only from one side.
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
Director: Michael Bay
Writers: Chuck Hogan (screenplay), Mitchell Zuckoff (book)
Starring: John Krasinski, Pablo Schreiber, James Badge Dale
Runtime: 144 mins
