13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

[Plain Old Tele]

Discuss.

[The Panda]

Wow... What an opener for my first movie of 2016.  It's surely setting a great tone of the fantastic cinema to come.  /s

 

I don't know where to start, so I'll start with the good.

 

The good is that it could be an entertaining, over-stylized Bayflick, if you turn your brain off and let Bay work his manipulative magic.  The problem with that, is that this isn't a Transformers movie, it's a movie trying to tell a political/foreign policy based story that has a lot of nuance, and it portrays it one-dimensionally.  You can't make a modern war movie over controversial events and treat it like a spectacle.  It turns the entire film into a propaganda film that doesn't encourage the viewer to think about what they watched, but it encourages the viewer to accept the story they're telling and that you're an idiot if you look at it in any other way. (At least I got that vibe from the fact any character that wasn't one of the main soldier was, "the bad guy", a stereotypical caricature of an "unqualified official", or a damsel.  A few of the soldiers had a little bit of depth to their characters, but they were mostly one-dimensional stereotypes that just knew better than their commanders.  And all of the commanders were idiots who didn't understand that all of the Muslims were "bad guys" wanting to get them)

 

I guess more good could be that the over-stylization produces some pretty nice and cool looking shots.  And every once in a while you'll get a shot, or a quick scene, that could potentially add more depth and grey to the film.  Only, straight after the scene, it goes straight back into War Propaganda of all of the bad brown guys shooting up the American flag, or a car zooming down a road with wheels on fire cause 'MURICA, or a shot of mosques and Muslims praying and ominous "chant" noises only to stop before the terrorists start swarming like it's a massive Islamic conspiracy against the Americans.  Or that everyone in Benghazi who isn't white just wants to shoot the Americans because they're all bad guys.  The movie completely overlooks any complexity during the entire Benghazi debacle.  

 

I've also heard a few comments saying the film tries not to be political.  I call bullshit on that.  Yeah, there's no scene of Hillary Clinton deciding not to pick up a phone.  But they make continuous references throughout the movie that are obviously trying to jab at the Obama administration.  Which, it would be fine, but the film doesn't provide the nuance.  It just tries to jab and manipulate.  It just makes out any state official to be idiots who want Americans to die.  You are only offered one dimension to a heavy topic.  It again, treats the situation like a Transformers/Propaganda movie (the way most Mid-West Americans want to see the events), when the events of this film should have been treated with balance.

 

As for other quality notions, Bay does his usual Bayisms.  He swells the music when he wants to work up your emotions, he shows overly long scenes of the soldier talking to his family with little substance to add, he does the ridiculous slow-mo shot of the soldier running to avoid an explosion, he clutters the screen with continuous movement, and there's random montages of shirtless soldiers lifting tires or weights or whatever the fuck they do.

 

The acting is good for a Bay film.  Minus a number of characters who are playing ridiculously annoying caricatures, the main soldiers do fine.  They aren't great, but there's a few strong moments.  

 

Honestly though, if this was a fictional story, it would be one of Bay's better movies.  Not a good movie by any means, but one of his better ones.  But the fact that it's not just taking true material, but it's taking highly controversial true material and turning into propaganda, that just makes me really hate the movie.

 

I can't give this movie an F though, because it has a good amount of merit to it.  It's not necessarily a painful cinematic experience like Revenge of the Fallen, as it's an angering cinematic experience to anyone who cares about highly political topics to be taken with balance and care.  But on the other hand, I probably passionately dislike (or even hate) this movie more than Id hate a movie like Revenge of the Fallen, even if 13 Hours is a much stronger movie technically speaking for the reason I listed above.

 

In this case my heart wants to give this movie an F, but my brain is saying a D.  Thankfully, I have a special rating I reserve for manipulative preacher films like this one.  I didn't give a single film the rating last year, because despite some truly awful films, none of them outright angered me in the way you have to to receive the rating I am going to give this.

 

I reserve Fs for movies that are painful cinematic experiences (in a bad way), by being bore you to tears awful with little to no technical merit in my eyes (or if it has merit, the bad just weighs it down too much for me to care).

 

I reserve Z's for movies I just flat out hate, even if the movie from an objective standpoint might not be dogshit awful.  Because I still hate it and I don't feel right ranking it with my D's or C's (or in some cases it's F quality and I hate it, but not this one.  It's probably D quality, and I passionately hate it).

 

Anyways, I give 13 Hours the same grade I gave gems such as 300 or America: Imagine A World Without Her.  I give 13 Hours a 

 

Z 

 

(I wasn't going into this review hating it that much, but the more I acknowledged things I hated about it, the more I realized how much I hated the movie.)

Edited January 16, 2016 by The Panda

[AniNate]

You had me with that first sentence for a moment. I was about to post how completely shocked I was you liked it.

[CaptainJackSparrow]

20 hours ago, The Panda said:

Wow... What an opener for my first movie of 2016.  It's surely setting a great tone of the fantastic cinema to come.  /s

 

I don't know where to start, so I'll start with the good.

 

The good is that it could be an entertaining, over-stylized Bayflick, if you turn your brain off and let Bay work his manipulative magic.  The problem with that, is that this isn't a Transformers movie, it's a movie trying to tell a political/foreign policy based story that has a lot of nuance, and it portrays it one-dimensionally.  You can't make a modern war movie over controversial events and treat it like a spectacle.  It turns the entire film into a propaganda film that doesn't encourage the viewer to think about what they watched, but it encourages the viewer to accept the story they're telling and that you're an idiot if you look at it in any other way. (At least I got that vibe from the fact any character that wasn't one of the main soldier was, "the bad guy", a stereotypical caricature of an "unqualified official", or a damsel.  A few of the soldiers had a little bit of depth to their characters, but they were mostly one-dimensional stereotypes that just knew better than their commanders.  And all of the commanders were idiots who didn't understand that all of the Muslims were "bad guys" wanting to get them)

 

I guess more good could be that the over-stylization produces some pretty nice and cool looking shots.  And every once in a while you'll get a shot, or a quick scene, that could potentially add more depth and grey to the film.  Only, straight after the scene, it goes straight back into War Propaganda of all of the bad brown guys shooting up the American flag, or a car zooming down a road with wheels on fire cause 'MURICA, or a shot of mosques and Muslims praying and ominous "chant" noises only to stop before the terrorists start swarming like it's a massive Islamic conspiracy against the Americans.  Or that everyone in Benghazi who isn't white just wants to shoot the Americans because they're all bad guys.  The movie completely overlooks any complexity during the entire Benghazi debacle.  

 

I've also heard a few comments saying the film tries not to be political.  I call bullshit on that.  Yeah, there's no scene of Hillary Clinton deciding not to pick up a phone.  But they make continuous references throughout the movie that are obviously trying to jab at the Obama administration.  Which, it would be fine, but the film doesn't provide the nuance.  It just tries to jab and manipulate.  It just makes out any state official to be idiots who want Americans to die.  You are only offered one dimension to a heavy topic.  It again, treats the situation like a Transformers/Propaganda movie (the way most Mid-West Americans want to see the events), when the events of this film should have been treated with balance.

 

As for other quality notions, Bay does his usual Bayisms.  He swells the music when he wants to work up your emotions, he shows overly long scenes of the soldier talking to his family with little substance to add, he does the ridiculous slow-mo shot of the soldier running to avoid an explosion, he clutters the screen with continuous movement, and there's random montages of shirtless soldiers lifting tires or weights or whatever the fuck they do.

 

The acting is good for a Bay film.  Minus a number of characters who are playing ridiculously annoying caricatures, the main soldiers do fine.  They aren't great, but there's a few strong moments.  

 

Honestly though, if this was a fictional story, it would be one of Bay's better movies.  Not a good movie by any means, but one of his better ones.  But the fact that it's not just taking true material, but it's taking highly controversial true material and turning into propaganda, that just makes me really hate the movie.

 

I can't give this movie an F though, because it has a good amount of merit to it.  It's not necessarily a painful cinematic experience like Revenge of the Fallen, as it's an angering cinematic experience to anyone who cares about highly political topics to be taken with balance and care.  But on the other hand, I probably passionately dislike (or even hate) this movie more than Id hate a movie like Revenge of the Fallen, even if 13 Hours is a much stronger movie technically speaking for the reason I listed above.

 

In this case my heart wants to give this movie an F, but my brain is saying a D.  Thankfully, I have a special rating I reserve for manipulative preacher films like this one.  I didn't give a single film the rating last year, because despite some truly awful films, none of them outright angered me in the way you have to to receive the rating I am going to give this.

 

I reserve Fs for movies that are painful cinematic experiences (in a bad way), by being bore you to tears awful with little to no technical merit in my eyes (or if it has merit, the bad just weighs it down too much for me to care).

 

I reserve Z's for movies I just flat out hate, even if the movie from an objective standpoint might not be dogshit awful.  Because I still hate it and I don't feel right ranking it with my D's or C's (or in some cases it's F quality and I hate it, but not this one.  It's probably D quality, and I passionately hate it).

 

Anyways, I give 13 Hours the same grade I gave I gave gems such as 300 or America: Imagine A World Without Her.  I give 13 Hours a 

 

Z 

 

(I wasn't going into this review hating it that much, but the more I acknowledged things I hated about it, the more I realized how much I hated the movie.)

Sounds like a great film, I can't wait to see it!

 

(But seriously now, ideally, Hollywood would stray away from political agendas in films from the left or the right, I wish Bay hadn't of politicized this,)

Edited January 16, 2016 by CaptainJackSparrow

[vc2002]

Let's face it, the only opinion that matters is baumer's, given this is a Michael Bay movie.

[The Panda]

54 minutes ago, CaptainJackSparrow said:

Sounds like a great film, I can't wait to see it!

 

(But seriously now, ideally, Hollywood would stray away from political agendas in films from the left or the right, I wish Bay hadn't of politicized this,)

 

To be fair, you can't do a film over Benghazi and it not be somewhat political.  But you could at least try to give the film some balance and not play it out like Donald Trump's wet dream.

[Kvikk Lunsj]

No Baumer review yet  

Edited January 16, 2016 by Darth Dexter of Hoth

[Webslinger]

Unlike everything else he has done, which I have found to be either deliriously enjoyable or unbearably overblown, Michael Bay's 13 Hours is just... there. Bay's direction of action is surprisingly but effectively restrained, as he plays up the visceral and chaotic nature of the standoff without much use of the distracting flourishes that defined his Transformers and Bad Boys films. It's easily the most grounded and focused action film he has ever made. However, where the film falls short is its characters. Despite taking a solid half-hour to develop several of the characters who play key roles in the action later in the film, said development rarely feels relevant to these characters once the gunfire begins, and as such, it lacks the immediacy and urgency that made other recent chronicles of military conflicts feel so emotionally potent.

 

C+

[filmlover]

I honestly had the same reaction to this as I did to Lone Survivor, which I guess is fitting since the set-up of both movies is roughly the same (30 minutes of introducing the characters without really fleshing them out before leading into 90 or so of relentless, testosterone-fueled misery porn capped off by a tribute to the real survivor/fallen heroes that is effective without being maudlin). Michael Bay wisely stays away from politics and such, but the lack of strong characterization makes it difficult to become involved in the fates of all involved. You could do better but you could also do worse. C+

[lilmac]

On 1/15/2016 at 3:07 AM, The Panda said:

Wow... What an opener for my first movie of 2016.  It's surely setting a great tone of the fantastic cinema to come.  /s

 

I don't know where to start, so I'll start with the good.

 

The good is that it could be an entertaining, over-stylized Bayflick, if you turn your brain off and let Bay work his manipulative magic.  The problem with that, is that this isn't a Transformers movie, it's a movie trying to tell a political/foreign policy based story that has a lot of nuance, and it portrays it one-dimensionally.  You can't make a modern war movie over controversial events and treat it like a spectacle.  It turns the entire film into a propaganda film that doesn't encourage the viewer to think about what they watched, but it encourages the viewer to accept the story they're telling and that you're an idiot if you look at it in any other way. (At least I got that vibe from the fact any character that wasn't one of the main soldier was, "the bad guy", a stereotypical caricature of an "unqualified official", or a damsel.  A few of the soldiers had a little bit of depth to their characters, but they were mostly one-dimensional stereotypes that just knew better than their commanders.  And all of the commanders were idiots who didn't understand that all of the Muslims were "bad guys" wanting to get them)

 

I guess more good could be that the over-stylization produces some pretty nice and cool looking shots.  And every once in a while you'll get a shot, or a quick scene, that could potentially add more depth and grey to the film.  Only, straight after the scene, it goes straight back into War Propaganda of all of the bad brown guys shooting up the American flag, or a car zooming down a road with wheels on fire cause 'MURICA, or a shot of mosques and Muslims praying and ominous "chant" noises only to stop before the terrorists start swarming like it's a massive Islamic conspiracy against the Americans.  Or that everyone in Benghazi who isn't white just wants to shoot the Americans because they're all bad guys.  The movie completely overlooks any complexity during the entire Benghazi debacle.  

 

I've also heard a few comments saying the film tries not to be political.  I call bullshit on that.  Yeah, there's no scene of Hillary Clinton deciding not to pick up a phone.  But they make continuous references throughout the movie that are obviously trying to jab at the Obama administration.  Which, it would be fine, but the film doesn't provide the nuance.  It just tries to jab and manipulate.  It just makes out any state official to be idiots who want Americans to die.  You are only offered one dimension to a heavy topic.  It again, treats the situation like a Transformers/Propaganda movie (the way most Mid-West Americans want to see the events), when the events of this film should have been treated with balance.

 

As for other quality notions, Bay does his usual Bayisms.  He swells the music when he wants to work up your emotions, he shows overly long scenes of the soldier talking to his family with little substance to add, he does the ridiculous slow-mo shot of the soldier running to avoid an explosion, he clutters the screen with continuous movement, and there's random montages of shirtless soldiers lifting tires or weights or whatever the fuck they do.

 

The acting is good for a Bay film.  Minus a number of characters who are playing ridiculously annoying caricatures, the main soldiers do fine.  They aren't great, but there's a few strong moments.  

 

Honestly though, if this was a fictional story, it would be one of Bay's better movies.  Not a good movie by any means, but one of his better ones.  But the fact that it's not just taking true material, but it's taking highly controversial true material and turning into propaganda, that just makes me really hate the movie.

 

I can't give this movie an F though, because it has a good amount of merit to it.  It's not necessarily a painful cinematic experience like Revenge of the Fallen, as it's an angering cinematic experience to anyone who cares about highly political topics to be taken with balance and care.  But on the other hand, I probably passionately dislike (or even hate) this movie more than Id hate a movie like Revenge of the Fallen, even if 13 Hours is a much stronger movie technically speaking for the reason I listed above.

 

In this case my heart wants to give this movie an F, but my brain is saying a D.  Thankfully, I have a special rating I reserve for manipulative preacher films like this one.  I didn't give a single film the rating last year, because despite some truly awful films, none of them outright angered me in the way you have to to receive the rating I am going to give this.

 

I reserve Fs for movies that are painful cinematic experiences (in a bad way), by being bore you to tears awful with little to no technical merit in my eyes (or if it has merit, the bad just weighs it down too much for me to care).

 

I reserve Z's for movies I just flat out hate, even if the movie from an objective standpoint might not be dogshit awful.  Because I still hate it and I don't feel right ranking it with my D's or C's (or in some cases it's F quality and I hate it, but not this one.  It's probably D quality, and I passionately hate it).

 

Anyways, I give 13 Hours the same grade I gave gems such as 300 or America: Imagine A World Without Her.  I give 13 Hours a 

 

Z 

 

(I wasn't going into this review hating it that much, but the more I acknowledged things I hated about it, the more I realized how much I hated the movie.)

 

You said you'll start with the good and I kept looking for the pluses in that first paragraph.  LOL

[lilmac]

18 hours ago, filmlover said:

I honestly had the same reaction to this as I did to Lone Survivor, which I guess is fitting since the set-up of both movies is roughly the same (30 minutes of introducing the characters without really fleshing them out before leading into 90 or so of relentless, testosterone-fueled misery porn capped off by a tribute to the real survivor/fallen heroes that is effective without being maudlin). Michael Bay wisely stays away from politics and such, but the lack of strong characterization makes it difficult to become involved in the fates of all involved. You could do better but you could also do worse. C+

 

Are you guys voting?

[The Panda]

2 hours ago, lilmac said:

 

You said you'll start with the good and I kept looking for the pluses in that first paragraph.  LOL

 

I think that signifies how much I enjoyed this movie.

[Ethan Hunt]

I don't think Panda and I saw the same film

[Water Bottle]

Good action scenes and it kept me interested throughout the movie. My main problem is that the characters tended to blend together.

 

B

 

 

I guess more good could be that the over-stylization produces some pretty nice and cool looking shots.  And every once in a while you'll get a shot, or a quick scene, that could potentially add more depth and grey to the film.  Only, straight after the scene, it goes straight back into War Propaganda of all of the bad brown guys shooting up the American flag, or a car zooming down a road with wheels on fire cause 'MURICA, or a shot of mosques and Muslims praying and ominous "chant" noises only to stop before the terrorists start swarming like it's a massive Islamic conspiracy against the Americans.  Or that everyone in Benghazi who isn't white just wants to shoot the Americans because they're all bad guys.  The movie completely overlooks any complexity during the entire Benghazi debacle. 

 

OR the scene where the muslim wives and kids go to the dead bodies of their parents, or the interpreter who stayed behind even when he was told he could go home because he wanted to see things through, or the muslim who bravely threw an RPG at the muslims shooting at the soldiers, or the scene where a Benghazi goes up to the CIA annex to tell them to turn off their lights because it reveals them. Yes, the "bad brown guys" shoot up an American flag because they are frankly shooting at everything and it's that kind of symbolic imagery that finds it's way into these kind of movies. The car zooming down the road with wheels on fire...well that is just a silly complaint and I didn't get a "'MURICA" vibe from it and none of the characters thought it was cool. In fact one of them states the car should have just gone left-meaning it's actually bad that it got this bad for that car. As for the muslims chanting and then stopping, it adds to the eerie feeling and the tension of not knowing who in Benghazi they could trust.

 

In fact, there's more evidence to suggest this is an anti-war movie than "war propaganda" because as Kransiki's character stated he would have died in a conflict that he didn't need to be in, didn't really understand, and in a country that didn't care about him. Seems to me like you wanted to hate the movie for being one-dimensional so you did ignore all of the grey shading it did provide.

[baumer]

Another stunning achievement from Bay.  There are few directors, if any, that can tell a story the way Bay does.  His camera does things that other director's simply don't do.  He adds so much nuance because of his thought process.  

 

My problem with views like Panda's are that I don't recall people bitching about Platoon or Apocalypse Now or Deer Hunter.  A war film doesn't have to tell both sides of the story.  They never did before.  What exactly do you want Bay and the writer's to do?  Do you want them to get into the heads and lives of the people shooting up the embassy?  Would you rather them focus 15 or 20 minutes on the guy shooting the RPG into the compound?  As WB said, he did plenty to show that these were fanatics and that not all Libyans were the bad guys.  There was even a quick shot at the end with a Libyan holding up a sign apologizing for what happened.  He also added a post script that said that thousands of Libyans attended the funeral of the American ambassador.  

 

I hate to paint you with broad strokes Panda, but it just seems to me that you wanted to hate this and you found reasons to hate it.  None of you xenophobia accusations have a merit of truth to them.  And this can be proven with everything WB mentioned as well as what I said.

 

Also, "everyone was the bad guy" yes this was uttered more than once in the film by the Americans.  But that's how it felt to them.  They didn't know if an approaching car would somehow start shooting at them.  They didn't know if the local police were there to help out or to kill them.  They didn't know if their "friendlies" were actually friendly.  All they knew is that it was chaos and that at any given moment they were going to be fired upon.

 

I think Bay did an excellent job telling this story.  His vision and attention to detail really helped bring this incredible story to life.  This was first and foremost a story about friends and brothers not giving up on one another.  These were not soldiers, they were security guards there to do a job.  And when they were over run and outnumbered and had to watch as a lot of their friends and acquaintances were killed, they never left one another and stayed till the end.  That makes them heroes.  It's not about heroic American and jingoism, this is a story about the human condition and doing the right thing.  

 

I thought the acting was outstanding as well and the script was well written.  This will certainly make my top 25 of the year.

 

9/10

[WrathOfHan]

Will this be know as the movie that everyone disagrees with Panda on?  

[Ethan Hunt]

1 hour ago, WrathOfHan said:

Will this be know as the movie that everyone disagrees with Panda on?  

Me and Baumer aren't exactly everyone

[vc2002]

Baumer liked it. That's it. That's all we need to know.

[The Panda]

On January 22, 2016 at 5:44 PM, WrathOfHan said:

Will this be know as the movie that everyone disagrees with Panda on?  

 

No, I'm pretty sure that'll be Norm of the North 

 

And just to clear up.  I mentioned (or meant to) a few times I thought the film had moments where a more competent director could have portrayed the situation worth more nuance.  But I'm not going to lie and say I thought the film followed the "Libyans are bad, Governments bad, only these soldiers know what's up".  The one good Libyan in the film was in my opinion turned into a caricature, just like I saw the soldiers as caricatures for soldiers.

 

Again, I probably could have given a lot of the things in the movie a pass had it not been such recent and controversial subject matter.  Even if it was another Middle Eastern War movie, like American Sniper, I could have given it a bit more of a pass.  But these events needed a treatment similar to how Bigelow went about Zero Dark Thirty or The Hurt Locker or they shouldn't have been covered at all.

 

When I watched, it felt like they were turning a recent controversial tragedy into an action movie they thought they could make money off of because of it being controversial material.

 

I really don't care if people make accusations against me saying I went in wanting to hate the movie.  I'll say now I didn't it.  I went in, skeptical of course about it being a Bay flick, but wanting the subject matter to be treated properly.  And honestly, the only way I thought it could have been done worse is if they literally showed Clinton not picking up the phone or something like that.

 

It felt like it was trying to capitalize on the tragedy financially, not portray the tragedy honestly and with nuance like it deserved.  

 

Again, I'm always stingy when it comes to modern military movies, because of how many people in my family have gone in and served.  I go into them wanting something specific, and that may be a fault on my part, but it's probably why the only one I've really actually liked this decade was Zero Dark Thirty.

Edited January 24, 2016 by The Panda

[baumer]

Zero Dark Thirty is a great movie as long as you look at it in the same way you do Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk.