'13 Hours' Trailer: Michael Bay Goes 'Black Hawk Down'

Paramount Pictures has released the first trailer for Michael Bay's Benghazi movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Based on the Mitchell Zuckoff's book about the dual 2012 attacks on American compounds in Libya, the story involves the attack which saw the loss of four American lives and created a political firestorm that continues to burn even after official inquiries have been handed down. Watch the 13 Hours trailer after the jump.

There's also this slightly different red-band trailer, which basically adds one F-bomb.

While the cinematography and style are unmistakably those of a Michael Bay film (you could show a blind man this trailer and he'd recognize the Bay authorship from the audio alone), the story feels more serious and intense and has a Black Hawk Down vibe.

I'm a Michael Bay fan (even an apologist) who really dug what he did a few years back with Pain & Gain, so I'm excited to see what Bay does with the absence of comedy in this story. (Comedy also being a big aspect of his films which is often criticized.) I'm also hoping that without the computer generated Transformers characters we might return to the filmmaker's more-comprehensible action storytelling seen in films such as The Rock and Bad Boys.

What did you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

The film, written by Chuck Hogan, features John Krasinski, Dominic Fumusa, James Badge Dale, Max Martini and Pablo Schreiber in a story about the team of "security operators" who unsuccessfully attempted to get US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens out of harm's way even as they did save other American lives.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi will hit theaters on January 15, 2016. The film, written by Chuck Hogan, features John Krasinski, Dominic Fumusa, James Badge Dale, Max Martini and Pablo Schreiber in a story about the team of "security operators" who unsuccessfully attempted to get US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens out of harm's way even as they did save other American lives.

The official description for the 13 Hours book follows:

13 HOURS presents, for the first time ever, the true account of the events of September 11, 2012, when terrorists attacked the US State Department Special Mission Compound and a nearby CIA station called the Annex in Benghazi, Libya. A team of six American security operators fought to repel the attackers and protect the Americans stationed there. Those men went beyond the call of duty, performing extraordinary acts of courage and heroism, to avert tragedy on a much larger scale.

This is their personal account, never before told, of what happened during the thirteen hours of that now-infamous attack. 13 HOURS sets the record straight on what happened during a night that has been shrouded in mystery and controversy. Written by New York Times bestselling author Mitchell Zuckoff, this riveting book takes readers into the action-packed story of heroes who laid their lives on the line for one another, for their countrymen, and for their country. 13 HOURS is a stunning, eye-opening, and intense book–but most importantly, it is the truth. The story of what happened to these men–and what they accomplished–is unforgettable.