13 Hours Red Band Trailer: Michael Bay Depicts Another American Tragedy

When it was announced that Michael Bay would take another break from smashing giant robots together and do a smaller, more-dramatic action movie, and that this supposed departure would be about the 2012 Benghazi attack, I immediately thought of Pearl Harbor. Here goes Bay attempting history again, specifically focusing on another American tragedy. But this is a smaller incident, without room for made up romances and bromances and also without room for so much explosive spectacle.

So, as the new trailers for 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (Red Band above; Green Band below) show us, this is more like Bay trying to do Zero Dark Thirty or Black Hawk Down or The Kingdom — all of them action thrillers based on true events that are serious enough to be able to get away with exploiting these deadly events for the purpose of entertainment (the last one of which is even from Michael Bay lite, himself, Peter Berg). Benghazi might be too recent and too touchy a subject for some people to enjoy as entertainment (even Pearl Harbor was too much for some viewers, particularly the bombing’s survivors, 60 years later). Especially if it’s Bayhem as usual here.

Will Bay include some sort of retaliatory happyish ending on this story, as he was able to do with the Doolittle Raid in Pearl Harbor? Yes, that included more tragedy (sorry for the spoiler) but not as major as the disaster in Hawaii. I guess if we’re unable to separate the movie from its extra-textual casting decisions, we may already be seeing a happy ending on screen here: John Krasinski and David Denman are starring together on the heroic security team, as if we’re seeing two romantic adversaries from The Office putting their differences behind them for the sake of America. I wouldn’t put it past Bay to have intended that subtext.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is due in theaters on January 15, 2016.

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