Now, to address the speckled major and minor achievements and flaws in Thirteen Days that, give the motion picture their credibility as a substitute for the real historical event in 1962. Initially, the movie misrepresents the military. The film is correct in showing high tension between the president and his uniformed and trigger-happy advisers. The chiefs of staff, some participants of ExComm, collectively recommend bombing Cuba and then following up with an invasion. Furthermore they try to dispute Kennedy out of his decision to defer direct military action and announce a naval quarantine so that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev could have time to judge peacefully withdrawing and dismantling the nuclear missiles he had secretly established into Cuba. However, Thirteen Days portrays the military as trying to corner Kennedy so he'd have no option but to do what they had recommended. This is not only unreasonable to the generals and admirals who served him in reality, but it misperceives entirely the sense of duty that consistently motivates Americans who wear uniforms.
There are other genuine questions about some of the photographical choices. Thirteen Days has no scenes in Moscow or Havana. It makes no attempt to advise why Nikita Khrushchev decided to sneak the missiles into Cuba or, in the end, to withdraw them. Aside from the young mistress with frightened eyes whom O'Donnell sees at the Soviet embassy when he's acting as Robert Kennedy's personal chauffeur, the only Russians who make appearances are diplomats or KGB officers who network directly with Americans. Incidentally, the only ordinary Americans in the movie are O'Donnell's wife and children. Their anxiety has to represent and monument for the entire nations populace.
The movie's less-than-perfect historical authenticity is more than balanced by its demonstration of three crucial facts about the missile crisis. The first such accuracy is that it was a real crisis in the medical sense of relating life or death. The film manages to convey, better than any previous performance, the escalating risk of global catastrophe. It accurately reproduces some of the reserved but suffered debate from the secret tapes, and it combines extraordinarily realistic footage of Soviet missile sites being speedily prepared in jungle provinces in Cuba, of American U-2s swooping over them, and of bombers, aircraft carriers, and U.S. missiles preparing for action when reaching the stage of DEFCON 2.
Second, Thirteen Days makes clearly understandable, the awful predicament that President Kennedy faced. It captures the reality that is so clear in the tape transcripts; “The crisis for Kennedy had very little to do with Cuba and much to do with the commitment he had inherited to protect two-and-a-half million West Berliners.” Kennedy had no reason to assume that the creation of the Berlin Wall in 1961 had diminished the enthusiasm of the East German Communist regime to add these West Berliners to its captive population. Quite on the contrary, the Wall was one piece of indication among many that the East Germans and their Soviet counterparts were running out of patience. Khrushchev had even cautioned Kennedy that he intended to solve the Berlin problem later in 1962. Anything that destabilized the credibility of this threat could have forced the U.S. president to surrender West Berlin or else set off what could have turned into global nuclear conflict. That was why Kennedy sensed he simply could not let Khrushchev get away with what he had started in Cuba. The movie gets this right where so many futile attempts have not.
Finally, the film succeeds in demonstrating the presidency as demanding an awfully high intelligence and cool judgment. Bruce Greenwood's wholly authentic performance as John F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days shows a real president, not an artificial character whose cadences are such of a Camelot Knight, but someone who recognizes that he has a very difficult job and that anything he does or says can have huge consequences. Undoubtedly, Thirteen Days demonstrates that it is a matter of great importance, on who gets elected to occupy the White House.
In conclusion, the verdict on the film, Thirteen Days historical accuracy is mixed. Thirteen Days is not a substitute for history. No one should see the movie expecting to learn exactly what happened. The movie modifies many small points and a few large ones. In most instances, these inconsistencies are basically the result of compressing into a two-hour film, a thirteen day crisis that had major twists more than once every half-hour. It's rare to see a politically centered movie with this much heart, though Thirteen Days may not be as edgy or risk-taking as one might like, it is undeniably rooted in true emotion one of the rarest things to capture in popular entertainment. Despite this, certain inconsistencies such as exaggerating the Joint Chiefs of Staff military arrogance and played as the “bad guys” and seeing the movie in only one perspective, hugely distorts the movies credibility and the reality, thus only leading to the end, that Thirteen Days can be seen no more than an engaging first-class thriller rather than a substitute for the authentic historical event.
