13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

Growing up in the 80's and 90's with Bruce Willis-esque heroes, I have a certain fondness for action movies. There's a formula to these things. The hero is introduced as a normal guy, with normal problems, but then the bad guys show up and you find out the good guy is actually a total bad-ass. He whoops everyone's ass, but gets banged up pretty bad in the process. In the end, though, the good guy wins, the bad guys die, and we walk out feeling like we are somehow braver and stronger just for having watched the movie. It's not real. You know it's not real, but it's entertaining.

In 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, the heroes really are normal people with normal problems; tactical, skilled, and well armed, but normal. They have money problems, family issues, poor work/life balance, and asshole co-workers. The bad guys are nameless, faceless, and indistinguishable from just about everyone else around them. Which, honestly, makes them far more terrifying. The good guys can't win this fight. We know that. We all saw the news coverage. This movie makes it real, though, in a way the media could not.

War movies aren't my thing,but I was strangely eager to see this one. I expected muscle bound, ex-pro wrestler types with little to no acting skills. Boy, was I wrong. This movie was brought to the big screen in an effort to tell the story of what really happened that night and, at the end of the film, that's what I walked away with. War is real. There was no effort to glamorize or glorify. There were no political agendas. It was what it was, and this movie truly moved me. If you haven't seen it yet, please do.