Michael Bay’s new film 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi did its best to make a movie about heroes, not politics. However, that hasn’t stopped the film from becoming a political topic, dealing as it does with a controversial event at a US diplomatic outpost in Libya in 2012. Some of the opponents, like Donald Trump, are looking to use the event as an attack on Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time of the event. If anybody is looking to debate the finer points of the screenplay, they can skip it, as she hasn’t seen the movie, and needless to say, probably won’t.
While it’s probably not surprising that Hillary Clinton hasn’t run to a theater to see 13 Hours, her explanation is more than a little odd. Nobody would have blamed her if she’d said that she doesn’t need to see because she knows what happened, or if she wanted to accuse the film of being inaccurate. Instead, she makes it sound like she would see the movie, she just hasn’t had time. She told CNN:
I’m just too busy campaigning.
Well, a political campaign is pretty much a full-time job, so we suppose there may be some truth to this. Of course, the real tragedy here is that if her campaign makes her too busy to see movies she also hasn’t seen anything good recently either. She’s probably missed Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Hateful Eight, too. Leonardo DiCaprio may win an Oscar next month for The Revenant, and she’s going to have no idea whether or not he deserved it. Still, the President of the United States has the time to watch a movie now and then, so you’d think a candidate could sneak away for a bit to grab some popcorn and enjoy a movie.
Most of the rest of the nation doesn’t have "campaigning" as an excuse, but the fact is they haven’t gotten around to seeing the film either. 13 Hours opened in a disappointing fourth place, and while the reviews haven’t been Transformers bad, they’re far from stellar. Most of the audience that did attend the film opening weekend fall on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Hillary Clinton, although the poor box office performance seems to imply that it’s because people on Clinton’s side of the fence tended to stay away from the movie overall.
So the numbers say that you didn’t go see 13 Hours this weekend either. Were you too busy campaigning as well? What’s your excuse?
