Imagine you are thousands of miles away from your family hired as a Special Ops Agent. You only have two weeks until you can return home, and your goal is to just make it through the remaining days. “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” is the true story of what happened on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi, Lybia.

As a result of the attack, four Americans were killed, among those were Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and two Navy Seals.
Director Michael Bay made the movie based off of “13 Hours” written by journalist Mitchell Zuckoff with five of the CIA contractors. The object of the film was to show how six CIA contactors protected the Lybian Embassy and CIA annex from militant groups on the 11 year anniversary of the Twin Towers attack, this time on screen.

With this choice to tell the story, the film received more creditably and let viewers make their opinions about what happened based on the facts. Bay, also the director of the four “Transformers” movies and “Pearl Harbor,” didn’t let conspiracy theories ruin his project.

When Bay started the makings of the movie, he was cautioned by his mother.

“She thought it was too political a story. ‘They’ll rake you over the coals,’ she said. And I told her. ‘It’s not political. It’s a story of Americans who became heroes,” Bay said in an interview with LA times.

According to Rolling Stones, “Benghazi, of course, has also become a political weapon for congressional Republicans attempting to derail the presidential campaign of then- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, so when a fillmmaker of Bay’s pedigree… announced he was doing a movie, it sparked no shortage of dubiousness.”

Bay did not do the movie to unleash any unknown facts or spark problems; he just wanted people to formulate an opinion on the facts, rather than hearsay.

“What’s to defend?” Bay said. “See the movie. Make your choice. What I do know is that when I show these guys doing their stuff, it’s accurate. We tried getting it really right.”

Having an extremely talented cast made things even more believable.

John Krasinki, otherwise known as Jim from the Office, was one of the lead actors. He played a father of two daughters and was the newest addition to the team.

The other actors who played the other five GRS members couldn’t have fit into their roles better. All of the men managed to capture the true fear that would have been there during the time of the attack. These men included James Badge Dale, Pablo Scheiber, David Denman, Dominic Fumusa and Max Martini.

Matt Letcher, who played as the ambassador Chris Stevens, only had a short time on screen but for the time that he was, he was able to show the passion for the Lybian people that the original ambassador had had.

Overall, Bay directed a though-out movie that gave the facts about something that seemed to have been kept on the down-low for some time. Bay found out the personal testimonies from each of the original Special Ops Agents and that allowed for a truly inspiring story.

“This is a true story,” Bay told Rolling Stones. “You have an obligation not to make the battle bigger than it was.”