13 Hours is Michael Bay at his most serious

Blender Dumbass
September 14, 2025

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#MichaelBay #13Hours #Benghazi #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #juliabutters

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There are two modes for Michael Bay: The playful mode of him having fun. This is the Bay of Bad Boys and Transformers. And a serious mode. That is the Michael Bay of films like Ambulance, Pearl Harbor and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. The latter of which is his most serious film ever.

If with Pearl Harbor Michael Bay was learning to be serious, which a lot of people completely misunderstood. ( I cover that in my review of Pearl Harbor ). And if Ambulance is somewhat of a self aware playful, but serious Bay. 13 Hours is him being serious the whole way through ( minus a cameo from his dog ).

13 Hours tells a story of 2012 Benghazi Attack where an Islamic Militant group attacked two US outposts in Benghazi Libya. It portrays the days leading to the attack, as well as the attack itself, recreating it as faithfully as Michael Bay can from any information he could get.

The film is a bit rough. It has less budget than your typical Bayhem! picture. And it is largely a screen adaptation of a huge battle. The huge battle starts at about a quarter of the film and goes on for the remaining 3 quarters. It has ton of shit going on. And yet it has a fraction of the budget it needs. That means the film feels a little rough.

Bay used everything from Film cameras to GoPros to Sony A7S ( a small digital mirror-less camera with surprisingly good low-light performance ) to shoot that film. Due to the story happening mostly at night, he could not do it in a golden-hour and required the cameras to work on full low light mode, which usually means, either boosting ISO ( making the shot noisier ) or boosting exposure times per frame ( making the motion blur stronger ). Both of which you can see in the film. Also because cameras like A7S are tiny and Bay likes to operate the camera handheld, there is not a lot of weight in the camera itself to smooth-out the motion. Making for very noticeable kind of shaky feel to some of the shots.

Yet, I think this rough quality to the movie is actually a good thing. Michael Bay is not a clean image type director. He is less James Cameron and more Lars Von Trier. Which means he likes his shots to feel raw and spontaneous. And that usually what brings out the emotions he is looking for. This film is probably the rawest he ever was in terms of dirty shots. And the film depicts hell of a raw situation. So in my opinion it was a good decision to shoot this movie the way he did. And not try to go the other direction as he did with Pearl Harbor.

There is this movie out now called Freakier Friday a sequel to Freaky Friday where one of the new additions to the cast is a teenage actress Julia Butters. I have stupid respect for her. By 13 she already worked with Steven Spielberg on The Fabelmans, with Quentin Tarantino on Once Upon The Time In Hollywood and of course with Michael Bay on 13 Hours.

If you've seen the Tarantino picture ( where she is like 10 ) you know how fucking good she is. She is so good, the plot hangs on her being fucking awesome to inspire fucking Leonardo DiCaprio to act better. Tarantino knew what he was doing, getting her for his film. And obviously Spielberg also needed to have a shot at working with her. Where she also had like an insane performance.

The first time I saw 13 Hours years ago, I didn't know who the fuck Julia Butters was. But this time around I knew who she was. And I payed fucking attention to her character. At first it seems Bay is not interested in her for anything but the little girl daughter of the main character played by John Krasinski. But then suddenly we get acting from her. Not something super emotional, or grandiose. Actually there is a little bit of that in that scene. But she is fucking funny. I bet Michael didn't really care about her until she did something on set, forcing Bay to make her role bigger. And give her more dialogue. Because of how fucking amazing she is.

If anybody who is reading this, by any chance is about to interview Julia Butters, please ask her about the "25 happy meals" scene from 13 Hours. I have to know how it happened.

Happy Hacking!!!