Bay Watching

The joy in being a movie lover is blowing the dust off not necessarily undiscovered gems but unfairly overlooked semi-precious treasures. The find this time is "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi," a 2016 film inspired by the heroism of six members of an American security team who defended a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya against terrorist attacks. On September 11, 2012, armed militants of Ansar al-Sharia (designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S., Turkey, the United Arab Emirate, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations) attacked the American diplomatic compound and a CIA annex in Benghazi.

Four Americans were killed, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. "For 13 long hours," in the words of The Chicago Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper, "it was up to a half-dozen civilians to protect American lives. Highly trained former military, to be sure, but civilians nonetheless."

Roeper observed, "This is no 'Zero Dark Thirty' or 'The Hurt Locker.' Lacking in nuance and occasionally plagued by corny dialogue, '13 Hours' is nonetheless a well-photographed, visceral action film, and a sincere and fitting tribute to those secret soldiers."

The surprise here is that "13 Hours" was directed by Michael Bay, best known for "Bad Boys," "Bad Boys II," "The Rock," "Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor," and all the "Transformers" pictures. Calling the filmmaker "the king of screen chaos," critic Manohla Dargis of The New York Times said Bay "makes big, bludgeoning movies stuffed with nonsense, special effects and military fetishism, and while they are ridiculous they can be absurdly entertaining when they're not boring you out of your mind. A maximalist to the max, he has no interest in artistic niceties like nuance, scale and pacing, but he does know how blow stuff up."

Michael Bay detonates pyrotechnics on the set of one of the "Transformers" films.

For a number of years, Michael Bay has been the whipping boy for critics and cinema purists alike. Rene Rodriguez, the reviewer for the Miami Herald, noted, "Bay's reputation in the pop culture arena is of a stereotypically slick, hotshot director whose movies are all assaultive flash and vacuous thrills - a perfect filmmaker...for the Xbox generation." According to Rodriguez, "The mere mention of his name is enough to make movie critics hiss and groan. Their feeling is shared by many serious film buffs, who argue his style of filmmaking is antithetical to the primal pleasure of movies - an engrossing story, told through images and populated by characters we can identify with."

Filmmakers Trey Parker and Matt Stone took Bay to task in their 2004 puppet comedy "Team America: World Police" with the romantic ballad "The End of an Act," which questioned, "Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies? / I guess 'Pearl Harbor' sucked / Just a little bit more than I miss you."

"Robot Chicken," the stop-motion animation comedy series co-created by actor-
writer Seth Green for Adult Swim, gave Michael Bay a good ribbing in a parody
trailer replete with a nonstop montage of things blowing up as the announcer
vocally provides the sound effects.

Regarding critics, Michael Bay once said, "They castrate me. They call me the devil and all that crap." He also remarked, "I don't make movies for critics. I make them for the average person to just go there and forget about their problems for two hours...Quentin Tarantino told me, 'Hey, dude, don't worry about it. They called me the Antichrist last year.'"

Michael Bay's entry to show business came at the age of 15 when he was hired to file storyboards for "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The experience earned him the enduring friendship of producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg. Spielberg, in fact, went on to serve as an executive producer on the "Transformers" films directed by Bay, including the upcoming fifth installment, "Transformers: The Last Knight,"  which Bay promised would be the last one he would personally direct.

The protege and the mentor: Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg offer their
impressions of trucks unfolding into Autobots at the premiere
of "Transformers: Age of Extinction."  

According to Bay. after he made "The Island," a science-fiction thriller from 2005 featuring Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Bean, and Steve Buscemi (the script for which had originally been sent to Bay by Spielberg), "Steven Spielberg called me...and said, 'You've always been one of the best shooters around, but now you're a real storyteller.'"

Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor run for their lives in "The Island."

Michael Bay's first formal film professor, Janine Basinger, chairperson of Connecticut's Wesleyan University Film Studies Department, often jokes that her gravestone will read, "She taught Michael Bay." Basinger does not think Bay is the devil. "I think he's a good filmmaker," she asserted. "I don't think he approached the medium with the idea of pleasing other people necessarily." Basinger insisted, "Michael is actually an abstract artist in the way he uses time, space, light, and color. He's almost an experimental filmmaker in that regard. He uses the medium in the fastest, sharpest way that it can be used, and if you don't like it, tough luck."

Bay directed a number of commercials early in his career, including the memorable "Got Milk?" spot featuring the peanut butter-jawing caller unable to spit out the name "Aaron Burr" in a radio contest (pictured below), which won the Grand Prix Clio for Commercial of the Year.

As the director of several music videos, Bay worked with Tina Turner, Meat Loaf, Lionel Richie, Wilson Phillips, Donny Osmond, and Divinyls. The Miami Herald's Rene Rodriguez commented that "it is the speed with which Bay cuts, an obvious remnant of his music video work, that is the most controversial element of his style."

The late Chrissy Amphlett, front woman for Aussie rockers Divinyls, emotes in
the music video for the band's controversial anthem to self-love, "I Touch Myself,"
directed by Michael Bay.

"When you're successful, everyone wants to see you fail," Michael Bay noted. "Every single movie that I've done, lucky enough, has been a huge hit. I don't have that flop yet." "Bad Boys," "Bad Boys II," "Armageddon," "The Rock," and "Pearl Harbor" grossed more than $1.75 billion worldwide. "Transformers: Age of Extinction" (also known as "Transformers 4") alone grossed $1 billion globally.

Troy Campbell, a "social scientist" who contributes to the Huffington Post, posited, "So why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies? Because bashing Bay is fun." In Campbell's words, "We love seeing Michael Bay movies, because even if we don't like the movies, we get to feel the joy of judging...With Bay's movies, we enjoy the process of making snarky comments as we watch...The movie could be bad, but the time we spend in the theater with the movie is fun."

The New York Times' Manohla Dargis commented that Bay's "new movie finds him trying something different...He has moderately scaled back his extreme-cinema approach for '13 Hours,' perhaps realizing that its story...merits a level of sobriety rather than showboating."

"It was a really heroic night," Michael Bay said on an edition of "Nightline," appearing alongside three survivors of the siege, Mark "Oz" Geist, Kris "Tanto" Paronto, and John "Tig" Tiegen. "I never knew that," Bay added, "until I read the book (Mitchell Zuckoff's 13 Hours: The Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi) and talked to these guys." He remarked, "The extraordinary thing about this story, they did not have to go. When they heard the RPGs and AK-fire they volunteered."

Michael Bay (far left) guests on "Nightline," with Mark Geist, Kris Paronto,
and John Tiegen.

In another interview, Michael Bay said he was initially attracted to the account of the "secret soldiers" (all of whom utilized aliases) based on his experience working with military veterans in previous movies, both as actors and as technical advisors, and he felt uniquely qualified to tell their story.

John Krasinski as Jim Halpert in "The Office"

Also on the episode of "Nightline" was actor John Krasinski, who pumped up from his days on "The Office" to play Jack Silva, the newest member of the team of six CIA contractors acting as security for a CIA outpost in Benghazi manned by 30 some operatives responsible for tracking the movement of weapons in unstable post-Gaddafi Libya.

John Krasinski gets intense as former U.S. Navy SEAL Jack Silva in "13 Hours."

"You risk your lives for anyone that needs help," Paronto stated on the broadcast. "That's where the difference is where people understand that we are going to give our lives. We are going to risk our lives for others if you need us to do it. That's how we're bred, raised."

The tragic outcome in Benghazi triggered massive investigations, at the core of which were questions concerning sufficient security and what then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did or did not know. After tens of thousands of pages of documents and hours upon hours of hearings, including several hours of testimony by Clinton, the House Intelligence Committee issued a report in November 2014, concluding there had been no wrongdoing in the administration's response to the attack. The House Select Committee on Benghazi, created in May 2014, turned up no new evidence of culpability by Hillary Clinton.

Speaking at the recent Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, a foreign service information management officer killed in the attack, told a sympathetic crowd, "I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son...Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes."

Mark Geist made the comment, "Do I hold (Hillary Clinton) accountable? No. You know who I hold accountable is al-Sharia. That's who attacked...That's who killed the ambassador."

Actually, there is very little politicking depicted in "13 Hours." Speaking for his comrades and the filmmakers, Kris Paronto said, "We want to tell what happened on the ground and really honor the courage that was taking place. We'll let other people deal with those issues."

Any politicking occurred after the movie was released. In "13 Hours," when the security team first hears that Ambassador Stevens' own security team is in peril, the nameless CIA base chief delays their response with an order to "stand down," an action the CIA and congressional reports denied ever happened. In a statement to ABC News, the CIA called the claims in the film "shameful" and "a distortion of events." Both Paronto and Tiegen insisted the stand down order was given twice. "It cost the lives of Sean Smith and Ambassador Stevens," Tiegen asserted.

Inevitably, "13 Hours" was criticized by Libyans, who maintained it ignored the contribution of locals who tried to rescue the ambassador. Also criticized was the film's "fanatical and ignorant" portrayal of the Libyan people. Libya's Culture and Information Minister said "the movie shows the U.S. contractors, who actually failed to secure the ambassador, as heroes," adding that Bay "turned America's failure to protect its own citizens in a fragile state into a typical action movie all about American heroism."

Some shortsighted critics couldn't see the screen past their raised noses and called "13 Hours" just another Michael Bay flick, particularly regarding the extended depiction of the relentless siege, as if there are any subtleties or nuances in combat. New York Daily News reviewer Joe Dziemianowicz wrote, "War is gritty here, not glamorous...(Michael Bay) delivers a gripping, harrowing, and heartfelt film."

William Friedkin, the director of "The French Connection," "The Exorcist," and "To Live and Die in L.A.," commented, "'13 Hours' is a powerful film that raises important questions that need to be answered." Richard Roeper called it "a solid action thriller with well-choreographed battle sequences and strong work from the ensemble cast."

As forceful and compelling as they are individually, the Moviehouse does have one point of contention with the ensemble cast, and that is the character jumble caused by the profusion of beards. Reviewing "13 Hours" for the alternative weekly newspaper The Portland Mercury, Ned Lannamann noted, "One of the beardies is Jim from 'The Office' but good f***ing luck telling the rest of them apart. Bay should know how to solve simple cinematic problems like how to differentiate your characters - did he learn nothing from producing 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'? Give 'em colored headbands...or different weapons at least." In Cleveland's The Plain Dealer, Michael Heaton offered, "When a movie is ALL action sequences, and ALL main characters have beards, this can be slightly problematic."

Watching "13 Hours," it gets to the point where the viewer ponders, "OK, John
Krasinski is the guy with the really black beard, and there's this dude with the
ginger beard, but then, who's this other guy with a brownish ginger beard?"

"13 Hours" is reminiscent of 2013's "Lone Survivor," starring Mark Wahlberg, based on the failed four-man Navy SEALs mission to track down and kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah in Afghanistan. The regrettable aftermath of both operations is known to the viewer beforehand, but the committed performances and sincere ambitions of those behind the cameras make the journey worth taking. Come to think of it, there has always been an attraction to movies about the forlorn hope, a phrase designating any desperate military mission that is unlikely to succeed. Think any film about the Alamo or any film about George Custer.

Michael Bay once responded to his critics by saying, "I make movies for teenage boys." "13 Hours" is the first movie he made for grown-ups. It is also the first movie in Michael Bay's career to be a financial disappointment and his lowest grossing picture to date. Which is a shame, since this film deserves to be seen.


Postscript:

In mentioning "Lone Survivor," a movie that virtually gives the ending away in the title (odds are pretty good that star Mark Wahlberg is going to be the last man standing), we in the Moviehouse couldn't help but recall, just for kicks, other film titles that spoil the ending. For example, take "An Officer and a Gentleman," which is exactly what Richard Gere becomes before the end credits crawl.

Then there's "Free Willy" - guess what? The orca gets released. With "Saving Private Ryan," notice it's not called "Trying to Save Private Ryan." The titles "Kill Bill" and "12 Years a Slave" pretty much sum up what happens in the last reels. And don't even get us started on the outcome of the Cold War boxing match telegraphed in the poster for "Rocky IV"...

...We think the Russian loses.