13 Hours (Michael Bay, 2016)

[flyonthewall2983]

The new Michael Bay movie had a premiere at Cowboys Stadium.

[beamish13]

The new Michael Bay movie had a premiere at Cowboys Stadium.

an appropriate venue to premiere a piece of right wing propaganda

[flyonthewall2983]

Yeah yeah yeah, but I'd think that would be a cool experience.

[Zot!]

I think they premiered Pearl Harbor on an aircraft carrier. God bless Michael Bay.

[Mr Sausage]

Visually, this is Bay's least characteristic movie. For long stretches you forget it's even his. There is the occasional shot and a certain clumsiness in the dramatic scenes that gives him away. But Bay has replaced his visual approach with one more familiar from other directors: lots of shaky handheld camera work, with a minimum of dramatic angles and camera positions, and compositions that are less busy and layered. The movie is a lot more like Scott's work in Black Hawk Down (which I've previously called the film Bay always wished he'd made), and achieves a lot of that movie's effectiveness. The battle scenes are intense and full of anticipation. The movie effectively shows the terror of fighting in chaos, where there's people everywhere and no way to tell what side they're on. The soldiers repeatedly have to ask both HQ and themselves who is with whom and whether they should fire on each new potential threat. Many of the movie's best scenes are in between gun battles, inhabiting the soldiers' confusion and stress. This is easily Bay's most exciting movie, and his most comprehensible, too, in its action scenes since, for all the chaos and shaky camera work, he doesn't make the gunfights his usual smear of isolated shots in quick succession. For every dramatic moment that is clumsy, overwrought, or rote is a battle moment that is immediate and honest. A very fine action film that shows Bay is able to excel at other people's styles.

Probably Bay's best film after Pain and Gain.

[warren oates]

I agree completely with Mr. Sausage's praise of this film. I saw it in the theater and couldn't believe how good it was. It's definitely a stronger war film than other recent films based on real life incidents like American Sniper and Lone Survivor. And, though Sausage is correct that Ridley Scott's earlier film about the chaos of urban combat in an African city is clearly Bay's model, in some ways I'd even rate 13 Hours more highly than Black Hawk Down when it comes to capturing the chaos compellingly.