13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) is Michael Bay's war thriller, and you can watch it online on iFILM. On the night of September 11, 2012, an armed crowd overruns the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya. Six private contractors stay behind to hold the line.

They are former Marines and special-ops shooters guarding a covert CIA annex nearby. When the compound next door goes up in flames, the station chief tells them to stand down. They go anyway. What follows is nearly a full night with no cavalry coming: tracer rounds, mortar fire, wave after wave at the wall. John Krasinski, James Badge Dale, Pablo Schreiber and Max Martini play men with kids waiting at home, not poster heroes.

The script draws on journalist Mitchell Zuckoff's book, built from the testimony of the survivors themselves. Bay strips away most of his usual gloss here: handheld cameras, darkness, the cramped geometry of a fortified courtyard. The film took heat for the politics surrounding the real attack, yet as a chronicle of one long siege it holds. Stream 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) online on iFILM.