Trailers Undone

Here’s the Quicktime trailer.

The trailer’s voiceover says: “I used to be just like you. Until I met her.” The implication is that you, the viewer, would be a much more interesting person if only Angelina Jolie would recognize that you and she are meant to be together, and Morgan Freeman took you under his wing and identified the hidden skills that will make you a superhuman.

The deeper implication, the one you’re not meant to examine, is that this will never happen to you, and if there was any chance that it would, then you wouldn’t need to see this movie as a substitute.

This is a “meant for greater things” story, with the attendant fantasy of discovering that your real parents were actually much more interesting than the ones who raised you.

It’s likely that the protagonist ends up doing battle with his new mentors. That’s how this kind of story works. The protagonist doesn’t really come into his own until he takes the gifts he’s given and makes his own decisions about how to use them. Morgan and Angelina probably killed his father. The guy who is ostensibly after him in the drugstore at the beginning is probably an ally.

About the images:

Annie is the archetypal orphan longing for an escape from her dreary existence through the idea of finding her long lost parents.

Superman and Luke Skywalker have a lot in common. Both grow up in a dreary rural existence, only to discover later, via heirlooms from their fathers, that something better lay in store…and yet, to really come into their own, they had to outgrow their fathers’ ideas.

Vader-Superman image by hmmmbates