Booms and bangs in Benghazi

If there’s one thing that Michael Bay does best, it’s blow things up. As the director of such explosion-centric movies as Armageddon, Transformers, and Bad Boys, he is personally responsible for trillions of dollars of damage and hundreds of thousands of lives lost on the fictional planet Earth.

He also knows how to exploit historical battles for his brand of cinematic propaganda. Remember Pearl Harbor (the movie, not the 1941 attack)? He turned it into a Ben Affleck vehicle that practically screamed how great America was. There wasn’t much of a story – there didn’t need to be. There were oodles of CG effects and all of the actors were there just to shoot guns and wave their flag.

Bay has taken that same ethos but replaced it with a more modern esthetic in his new effort. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi retells the 2012 attacks on a diplomatic compound and a covert CIA base in Libya, a country in increasing public strife in the wake of the capture and killing of former dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. People were restless and an American ambassador was trying to encourage positive change. Of course, protection was needed and that came in the shape of six ex-paramilitary soldiers.

Six very American ex-paramilitary soldiers. If you’re not familiar with Bay’s oeuvre, he slathers every film with a slavish kind of patriotism that would make any audience gag if they weren’t born and bred in the U.S. of A. This is not the kind of fare that translates well overseas. It practically screams America at the top of its lungs.

And it does all of this with a more immersive experience inside the camp where all of the bombs are exploding. Prepare yourself for fewer Transformers-style CG shots and lots more bullets.

This contemporary action flick makes all of your father’s stoic war movies of the past look like Shakespeare. Whereas we used to enjoy dialogue as a method of adding to the dramatic build-up toward the battle royale at the end, we now must endure endless gunfights where missiles, grenades and machine guns are the only forms of communication.

The plot of 13 Hours is mostly a very brief setup to the main event and then it proceeds with a 1.5 hour-plus sustained barrage of flashes and bangs, loud noises and fiery visuals. I’ve been shell-shocked at Bay’s movies in the past and the stultifying but realistic action had the same effect this time too. I received a piercing headache and an urge to claim PTSD.

I’m not kidding. But perhaps that’s the one redeeming factor of this movie. While it comes across as one great “Be All You Can Be” commercial, it’s also an assault on the senses that offers the viewer the psychological impact of such violence even if it glorifies it at the same time.

13 Hours is not much for nuanced dialogue. It’s not a movie like Hyena Road with a message about the impossibility of a North American understanding about complex Middle Eastern politics. It’s more of a procedural drama of hero worship where nationalistic heartstrings are pulled with as much machismo and bravado as possible. True to life or not, this is the sort of movie that makes me squirm with its brutally obvious trumpeting of weaponry to the lowest common denominator. It’s dangerous filmmaking too, especially in our world of tyrants and reactionaries. You should come out of the theatre feeling sad for the future, and cinema.