Tonight on Netflix: Michael Bay’s authentic and bloody war film

Adapted from the book by professor and journalist Mitchell Zukoff, 13 Hours focuses on the events of September 11, 2012 in the Libyan city of Benghazi, where six security operatives battled for 13 hours against terrorists who attacked a US Army Special Missions camp. and the CIA agency.

Of course, it’s always easy to reduce Michael Bay, like Hollywood’s king of pyrotechnic effects, to a filmography that would more or less be summed up in the regular spin-offs of the Transformers and Bad Boys franchises, mixed with patriotic and Type 6. Underground Testosterones (for Netflix, by the way).

But the interested party can also break through solid and sometimes surprising works like the excellent and very dark No Pain no Gain, or, more recently, this. 13:00, That he signs with an envelope of barely 50 million dollars. If Bay offered the title role to Mark Wahlberg, who had to turn it down due to scheduling reasons, Bay chose lesser-known actors (John Krasinski, James Badge Dale, Max Martin, etc.) so as not to overshadow the story and thus emphasize On the realistic side of the film, which was unfortunately a commercial failure at the box office, grossing only $69 million worldwide.

In The Fall of Black Falcon, which still remains the absolute benchmark in this matter, the filmmaker delivers the very opposite of the label “patriotic film” that sticks to his skin.

In this case, the United States’ abandonment of their tragic fate with the 35 people trapped in the compound of the United States Embassy in Libya, and then the storm. Documentary and quite critical of the US bureaucracy, tense to the point of explosion, startling in its realism, this powerful modern Alamo is an ultra effective war/action film. It cannot be refined; But at least that is not what is being asked of him. So it is highly recommended.