A second trailer for Michael Bay’s action thriller—or possibly documentary—about the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya was released Tuesday.
The trailer for 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi features new action sequences and clues about the plot.
“When everything went wrong, six men had the courage to do what was right,” reads the trailer’s accompanying text.
The film is adapted from the book 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi by Mitchell Zuckoff, which documents the heroism of six American security operators as they tried to fend off a deadly attack by an al-Qaeda offshoot.
Bay’s take on Benghazi has drawn the ire of liberal writers, many of whom already hold the “the auteur of awesome” in contempt for his populist work product.
Salon said the first trailer was a “shallow and jingoistic treatment” of an al Qaeda terrorist attack, as opposed to the infinitely-nuanced and cosmopolitan treatment the author evidently preferred. A patronizing Vox article called the trailer racist, “patronizing and dishonest.” Slate said the trailer is “baffling.”
Underlying these critics’ grave concerns is the chief concern that the film will hurt the image of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which has finally begun to recover following her testimony before Congress and a media blitz by her campaign network.
Clinton’s defense of her handling of the Benghazi attack has been complicated by news from her testimony. Emails released by the Benghazi committee reveal that Clinton knew within hours that the attack was carried out by al Qaeda-like elements, yet she told the public that the attack was a spontaneous outgrowth of a protest of an anti-Islam video.
13 Hours will be released January 13.
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