In a Wall Street Journal article entitled Hollywood Goes to Benghazi, former security contractor Mark Geist (whose real-life experiences partially inspired this film) recalls testing the seriousness with which ’splosions enthusiast Michael Bay intended to tell his story. Noting that “he always has a girl’s butt in every Transformers, Pearl Harbor, The Rock”, Geist jokingly suggested a moment in 13 Hours that might accommodate such a shot. But Bay’s mind was on higher things. “He’s like, ‘No, we’re not gonna do it’,” Geist told the WSJ. “That showed me how serious he was about this movie…”
The absence of gratuitous butt shots aside, 13 Hours is very much business as usual for Bay; a barrage of noisy and largely indecipherable action, most notable for an ADHD visual style that marries the skittering viewpoint of a supercharged drone with the editing rhythm of a heavy metal drum solo. I went into the film knowing almost nothing about the September 2012 attack on an American diplomatic compound in Libya and came out knowing even less. For the most part, Bay seems to be aiming for the nihilism of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, which effectively conveyed the chaos of its real-life subject matter.
Yet the chaos of 13 Hours has more to do with form than content, leaving you with the impression that it’s not battle but Bay’s moviemaking that is hell. The director claims that his film “doesn’t get political at all”, concentrating solely on “what happened on the ground”, but you’d have to be asleep (a tempting prospect) to miss the Fox News-friendly messages about lily-livered bureaucrats and liberal politicians being to blame for the loss of American lives.
Skype sessions with loved ones give our heroes thumbnail backstories (pregnant wives, missed kids, etc), but Bay is only interested in the machinery, lovingly reproducing the bomb’s-eye-view shot from Pearl Harbor, with hardware becoming the film’s only fully-rounded character.
