13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

13 Hours (2016) covers the 2012 attack on the American facilities in Benghazi and the six contract security operators who were there. On the night of 11 September 2012 the diplomatic mission is overrun first, then the CIA compound about a mile away comes under attack. The six men in the film are former special forces; officially they are not there, and no authorisation to intervene arrives. They are told to wait. After a while they go without it. The tension at the centre is not the fighting but that wait. They can hear people dying a kilometre away and no order comes. It is adapted from Mitchell Zuckoff's book, which rests on the accounts of the security operators present. Michael Bay directed and has largely dropped his usual manner: the cut rate is low, there is little slow motion, almost none of the usual flourish. The film was born into a political argument. The event was the subject of congressional investigations for years and the film opened in an election year. Bay said it was not political; many critics disagreed, because the narrative follows one side's account directly. The night shooting, the sense of a real place, and the confusion of a fight without a map are all well built. It runs 144 minutes. Good for: war films, true events, and siege tension. Less good for: the violence is relentless, it is long, and the political context of the event is missing.