’13 Hours’: Can Michael Bay Pull Off a Gritty Movie About Benghazi?
When Michael Bay wants to screen a cut of his movie, he calls Anthony. Anthony flies from L.A. to wherever Bay is with a pair of digitally encrypted hard drives – one primary, one backup – that will allow Bay’s movie to be projected in a certain theater at a certain time before, basically, self-destructing. “He does this for Steven and me,” Bay says, meaning Spielberg. Tonight, the theater is in a South Beach multiplex that Bay has arranged for the occasion, where he’s sitting in the third row of a totally empty theater, Nikes propped on the seat in front of him. “We don’t do anything small,” he says.
Michael Bay, small? That’s like telling the sun not to shine, the grass not to grow, the 10-megaton nuclear device not to explode. From Armageddon to Pearl Harbor to his $3 billion Transformers franchise, Bay has spent his 20-year career going bigger, louder, more explode-y. Together, his 11 films have grossed a staggering $5 billion-plus, making him the fourth-most-successful director of all time. “That’s international,” corrects Bay politely. “Domestic, I’m number two.”
Bay’s new film is called 13 Hours, and it’s about Benghazi. More specifically, it’s about the six American CIA contractors who defended a U.S. diplomatic outpost on September 11th, 2012, after it was attacked by Libyan militants. Four Americans were killed, among them Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and two former Navy SEALs.
Benghazi, of course, has also become a political weapon for congressional Republicans attempting to derail the presidential campaign of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, so when a filmmaker of Bay’s pedigree (Victoria’s Secret commercials, Bad Boys II) announced he was doing a movie, it sparked no shortage of dubiousness. The jokes practically wrote themselves: Starring Martin Lawrence as President Obama! Adriana Lima as Hillary Clinton! Even people making the movie wondered if Bay was the right choice. “It might be hearsay,” Bay says, “but I heard [producer] Erwin [Stoff] said, ‘I don’t want to use Michael as the director. I’d rather a better director do it.’ ”
(Says Stoff, “I think that’s been twisted a little bit.”)
Bay’s alleged cinematic sins have been well documented: the explosions, the hammy one-liners, the epileptic editing, the indifference to narrative logic, the explosions, the explosions. By now, he has little interest in defending himself. “What’s to defend?” he says. “See the movie. Make your choice. What I do know is that when I show these guys doing their stuff, it’s accurate. We tried getting it really right.”
It’s fair to be skeptical about claims of realism from a director who once said, of a fireball in Armageddon, “Now, I know there’s no fire in space. But it’s a movie, and most people don’t know that.” In some ways, though, Benghazi is a perfect fit for Bay. 13 Hours is based on a book of the same name, written by journalist Mitchell Zuckoff with five of the CIA contractors. Much of it sounds like something right out of a Michael Bay movie: There’s a weaselly desk-jockey boss, a family-man CIA contractor doing one last job. At one point, one of the heroes climbs into an armor-plated SUV and can’t find anywhere to put his coffee and grumbles, “Spend $250,000 on a damn Mercedes and there’s no cup holder? What kind of bullshit is that?” – which is almost literally a line from Bad Boys.