Watch the first trailer for Michael Bay's Benghazi movie

With movies like Bad Boys, Armageddon, and the Transformers series, Michael Bay has spent decades cultivating a reputation for using a sledgehammer when a gentle tap would do. But Hollywood's blockbuster-iest director is going smaller and more human-sized for his next movie, 13 Hours, which offers a dramatized version of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya in 2012:

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Bay has definitely toned down his usual excesses for his take on the still-controversial story, which avoids being overtly political by focusing on the U.S. soldiers who defended the embassy from the Islamic militants who attacked it. "When everything went wrong, six men had the courage to do what was right," says the trailer, amid footage of the carnage at the embassy.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi hits theaters in January.

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