Trailers Undone

Watchmen is a superhero story that focuses on the type of normal human beings who want to become superheroes so badly that they actually do. Special is the story of a normal guy who is deluded into thinking he has special powers, so he becomes a superhero.

Watchmen Quicktime trailer

Both movies are about people who see in themselves, or want to see in themselves, a closer personal connection to the myths that inspire them.

Special Quicktime trailer

Historians like to say that the early Egyptian pharoahs were “open behind,” meaning that they were both god and man at once. The god was a sort of magic shell that could be inhabited by many people over time. It wasn’t seen as a trick or a deception; that’s just how it worked. Unfortunately, being a god/man meant that you could only reign for a short period of time; after that, your subjects would ritualistically kill you in order to demonstrate reverence for the natural rhythms of nature. Eventually, the pharoahs changed that ritual to keep themselves alive, but they were no longer open behind; they were simply men claiming to be gods.

The point is: Everyone wants to connect with the supernatural. Everyone wants to be the supernatural. If you don’t have a myth that breaks the fourth wall and invites us inside, then we are going to find a way into it ourselves.

The Reader quicktime trailer

Valkyrie quicktime trailer

There are two types of movies about the Holocaust: those that offer to take us back to a simpler time, when it was easier to distinguish between good and evil; and those that offer to comfort us for our own modern sins with the knowledge that Nazi Germany contained just as much moral ambiguity as anywhere else.

This second idea is more palatable as we gain more and more chronological distance from the events themselves. But it also has increasing appeal for Americans who have the disturbing feeling that they are living in the belly of a beast that has the potential to do a lot more damage than Hitler’s machine. The fact that Berlin, is becoming a thriving cosmopolitan cultural center, doesn’t hurt either. People want to convince themselves that it’s okay to like Germany again, and movies like these help.

Tropic Thunder trailer

Rain Of Madness trailer (requires iTunes)

A lot of interesting stuff going on here. Tropic Thunder is a parody of, among other things, Apocalypse Now. So Rain Of Madness, the non-existent documentary about Tropic Thunder, is a parody of Hearts Of Darkness, the documentary about Apocalypse Now.

It’s an interesting time to make a comedy about the war in Vietnam, given that the US is currently involved in another endless police action. But Tropic Thunder isn’t, on its face, a comedy about war. It’s a satire of the whole idea of making a movie about war.

This extra level of remove insulates the audience from having to think directly about what this movie really is: a sophisticated comedy about the war in Iraq. Not just the war itself, but the perceptions that surround it: the way it’s imagined vs. the way it’s realized, what it’s like to really be in combat vs. what it’s like to feel so immersed in war toys, imagery, and information that you feel you might as well be there, even when you’re not.

If you pay attention to the Tropic Thunder trailer, you’ll see that the heart of it is just the old Seven Samurai formula: A group of misfit performers find themselves having to actually do what they previously only pretended to do. For them, the comedy becomes serious. The audience gets the chance to laugh at a situation that’s both serious and funny, but above all, pathetic. In this context, it means that Americans can laugh at how ridiculous it is that we’re still sending troops to Iraq.

The same trick is being used to make jokes about racial stereotypes. If I’d told you last year that Robert Downey Jr. was going to do a movie in blackface, you might not have believed it. But now, ha ha, he’s doing a movie about an actor doing a movie in blackface, so that’s okay, because it’s not really Robert Downey Jr. doing a movie in blackface. But it is.

Isn’t it?

Well, not explicitly. But if you saw his interview with Will Smith last night, you know what I’m talking about. Colbert’s final question to Smith was whether Hancock is a metaphor for the United States - powerful but reckless - and Smith came about as close as he will ever get to squirming.

See my discussion of Hancock from months ago, where I suggest the same thing.

I’ll embed the YouTube clip of the Colbert-Smith interview as soon as someone posts it…don’t see it yet. Anyone else?

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.

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The edgy silence that pervades the theater while this trailer plays is a lot like the kind of silence you feel when you watch one of the people you respect most in the world take a pratfall. You sort of sit there and wait for guidance as to how you should feel about it. In other words, it’s almost an embarrassed silence, but not quite, because, hey, everyone is thinking, this could be good. After all, we still don’t really know anything about the movie.

But see, when a trailer doesn’t tell you anything about the movie, that’s almost always a bad sign. It usually means that the movie isn’t strong enough to sell itself, so the trailer has to do it. And in this case, all the trailer has to say is, “Look! Another Indy movie!”

And no doubt, in this particular case, that’s going to get asses in seats. And yet…we’re treated to not a
single genuine character moment, not a single in-joke, not even a hint to reassure us that there is actually going to be a story in there somewhere. We get to hear Indy warn his fellow spelunkers: “Don’t touch anything,” and we are asked to share a chuckle as Marion says that she doesn’t think Indy plans his chase scene tactics very far ahead…and yet, these are both non-ironic recyclings of dialog we’ve already heard. And sure enough, there’s the hot Nazi (or Nazi-esque) villainess.

It’s also possible that the movie is a masterpiece of nuance and terseness, the likes of which Tarkovsky would have been jealous of, and that the studio is afraid nobody will want to see that, so they’re releasing a nonsensical trailer containing only the parts of the movie that are likely to be enjoyed by the mouth-breathers. But I doubt it.

Indy 4 Trailer (I can’t even bring myself to write out the retarded full name of the film.)