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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Michael Bay's ‘13 Hours' dishes up conservative propaganda

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John Krasinski attends the premiere of "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi" at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016.

Hillary Clinton haters around the country are surely rejoicing: Michael Bay has made a movie just for them! Indeed, the director’s latest flick, “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” is unabashedly tailored to the conservative crowd, and, for Clinton detractors eager for another chance to rehash their opinions about the former Secretary of State’s handling of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, it is Christmas come early.Yes, this is the very movie that inspired your Donald Trump-supporting uncle’s latest rambling anti-Hillary Facebook tirade. Spoiler alert: It is not very good.

That being said, however, it is hardly fair to go into a Michael Bay movie expecting it to be good. Good is beside the point. Bay specializes in movies in which everything gets blown up and attractive men run around saving the day, and “13 Hours” is more than willing to serve up these moments. The result is, of course, entertaining enough for moviegoers who like their films heavy on gender norms and machine guns but light on subtlety and historical accuracy.   

The plot is expectedly straightforward. Jack Silva (John Krasinski) arrives in Benghazi — one of the most dangerous places on earth, or so the movie tells us, to join a team of highly trained military contractors operating out of a (not-so) top-secret CIA base in the city. The work is dangerous but fairly routine. Enter Chris Stevens (Matt Letscher), the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, who has come to stay at a nearby American diplomatic compound. That this is a poorly protected enclosure and not a well-fortified embassy becomes immediately clear. It is vulnerable and tensions are running high in Benghazi. On the night of Sept. 11, the compound comes under attack from local militants, and the military contractors are forced to protect both this compound and, soon, their own CIA base. The rest of the movie plays out over the course of this increasingly violent and tragic night.

As is perhaps obvious from the plot description, the contractors spend most of the movie engaged in a limited number of activities. There are lengthy sequences devoted to their firing seemingly endless rounds of ammunition into the night. They shoot indiscriminately at anyone and everyone who doesn’t look like them (i.e. not white and muscular), and the soldiers themselves even admit several times that they have no idea who they are aiming at. Let us be clear, thoughthis does not stop them from shooting at anyone with brown skin and a gun. Fans of bland, generalized patriotic statements or pseudo-philosophical musings about war will also find much to love in “13 Hours.” Even in the midst of a firefight, the contractors enjoy a nice reflection on what it means to fight for the good ol’ US of A — or else they crack a joke, which is the movie’s way of reassuring us that, even in the most traumatic and violent situations, these brave soldiers can still be funny. They are very resilient men and American as apple pie, thank you very much.

With the contractors, Bay attempts to resurrect the war hero of a bygone era; each one feels like Captain America-lite, inserted into our modern age of purposeless wars. Needless to say, it does not work. It is a premise too simplistic, unoriginal and ill-suited to characters fighting a war most Americans likely do not even believe in. We are not fighting Hitler anymore, and this conflict’s moral gray area is too obvious for the good-guy-war-hero character to feel relevant.

What is most problematic (and curious) about “13 Hours” is its attempt to offer a thought-provoking commentary about the never-ending American presence in the Middle East. Though the contractors explicitly acknowledge that this fight is not theirs, that they do not know why or who or what they are fighting, that these deaths of Americans and Libyans feel needless, their words ultimately ring false given the content of the movie itself. All “13 Hours” cares to tell us about Libyans is that they are scary and Muslim and have brown skin and that it is okay, good even, to shoot and kill them with reckless abandon in the name of protecting America. This is not to say that there were only good-hearted innocent people among the militants, nor is it an attempt to to write off the deaths of Americans killed in the attack. Nevertheless, it feels reductive to have yet another move in which brown people are the villains and the handsome, white Americans get to kill them and then save the day. Filmmakers need to create movies that challenge this trope, not uphold it. In this age of campaign trail-fear mongering about Muslims, to do anything else simply feels dangerous.

 

Summary "13 Hours" will satisfy moviegoers who like their films heavy on gender norms and machine guns but light on subtlety and originality.
1 Star