Obviously, John Milius won. That clownish, he-man fascist of post-Vietnam American cinema was an amusing anomaly back when his weak-kneed pussy liberal friends like Francis Coppola and George Lucas were running the show, but he had his uses, principally a talent for good dialogue. Plus, he was clairvoyant.

Michael Bay—who was pooped out by Milius after a particularly vigorous raw venison lunch back in the ’80s, probably—has no ear for dialogue at all, but his lizard-brained hard-on for high-tech, guts-’n’-thunder, all-American slaughter is the steeliest evidence we have that Hollywood has gone all-in with the Pentagon.

Taking a break from the more down-to-earth business of his Transformers franchise, Bay has adapted Mitchell Zuckoff’s book of the same name (authored with the Annex Security Team—whoa!!!), which is about whatever the fuck happened at that U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya in 2012.

I’ve seen the film, and from what I can tell, Jim from The Office plus five identically bearded private security contractors had to mobilize against an attack by militants when their government mysteriously wouldn’t. This kind of work requires an almost transcendental level of moral clarity. On the one hand (between all that killing), you’re required to save the hide of the pencil-pusher in a nearby CIA station who keeps barking at you to stand down; on the other, you need to impatiently remind the Libyan asset who risks his life on your command: “Your country’s gotta figure its shit out.”

This film is actively evil, but only by degrees. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is hardly any less stupid and reactionary, and it’s probably worth noting that Bay has one of his characters reading and then quoting from The Power of Myth, a later work by George Lucas’s favourite author, Joseph Campbell. The circle is now complete, as the saying goes.