I haven't seen Michael Bay's Benghazi movie, and unless I have to for some reason I don't plan on seeing Michael Bay's Benghazi movie. I took one look at the phrase "Michael Bay's Benghazi movie" and immediately thought "Was a Call of Duty movie deemed too risky?". Everyone was expecting it to be "American Sniper: Election Year Edition", and my only real question about it was who would be more obnoxious about its existence; angry irrational Trump boosting family on Facebook or angry irrational Sanders boosting friends on Twitter.
But now it looks like the question is if anyone will talk about it at all. Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is a massive flop. Critics savaged it, and audiences have largely stayed away. This is the first time in Bay's career that he's had an unqualified failure on his hands, one that looks doubly bad after American Sniper was aimed at the same audience at the same time last year and became the highest grossing film of 2014. Again, I haven't seen the movie, but that doesn't mean I can't weigh in on why 13 Hours is tanking so hard. If you ask me, it comes down to pre-release buildup and perception of the subject matter.
American Sniper had time to build up hype on the twin conservative media juggernauts of talk radio and Fox News during it's Oscar Season qualifying run - and for good measure it was about a subject that they had already thought of as an impossibly noble hero; Chris Kyle had been posthumously cast as an unambiguous good guy in the increasingly murky War on Terror. Not only that, but coming out in time for that Oscar qualifying run meant that the Academy could fulfill its obligation to nominate anything Clint Eastwood is attached to before he dies and put it up for 6 Oscars including Best Picture, meaning that it had even more steam behind it. Combine that with the residual high of sweeping Republican victories in midterm elections a few months before and you have a perfect pep rally for the right wing.
13 Hours, on the other hand, failed to come out in time for consideration by the Academy, and it wasn't heavily screened for critics, meaning that it had nowhere near as much time to build up momentum. Even if it had qualified for the Oscars, Michael Bay simply does not have anywhere near as much clout within Hollywood as Clint Eastwood does. If anything they tried to top American Sniper; there was a big publicized world premiere at AT&T Stadium in Dallas with Bay himself and two of the survivors of Benghazi present, Donald Trump rented out a theater in Iowa to show the movie to supporters, but it just couldn't reach critical mass. American Sniper's ascendancy was lightning in a bottle, it came out at just the right time under just the right circumstances to be a hit, and those circumstances are nearly impossible to recreate.
Especially without the distance neccesary to make a story out of its subject matter. People have compared 13 Hours to Bay's Pearl Harbor, the last time he tried for an Oscar by making a CGI spectacular action film out of a real-life tragedy, but Pearl Harbor at least came out decades after the events it depicts, there was time to grieve. But with 13 Hours, the survivors of Benghazi are still here and still telling their story, and Libya is still a war torn mess to this day. This is like making a disaster movie about 9/11 in 2003; it simply isn't viable because of how insultingly tone deaf it is.
That, at the bottom of it all, is why American Sniper was a massive hit, and why 13 Hours is a flop. Chris Kyle's story happened long enough ago that it's "okay" to make a sweeping generalization of it, while Benghazi is still too recent and too real for too many. As I understand it, the right wing's image of Chris Kyle is "common man becomes a hero after being caught up in the sweep of history", but their image of Benghazi is "incompetent bureaucratic clusterf***" and/or "deliberate sabotage and cover-up in service of the Obama-Clinton Doctrine". Which of those sounds like a more compelling narrative around which to build an event movie that people will want to see?
Have a nice day,
Greg.B
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