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Trailers Spoil the Fun

Started by AndyC, February 22, 2002, 01:14:27 PM

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AndyC

The Super Troopers post below made me think of this. It's almost expected with today's bad comedies that we'll see all the good parts at least a dozen times before we see the movie (if we get sucked in). When you're completely sick of the good parts, what's left? A movie that might otherwise have been tolerable just outright sucks.

Trailers can raise our expectations and mislead us. Whoever edited together the trailer for the remake of the Haunting obviously knew far more about scaring people than most of the other people connected with the movie. It gave me the willies. As for the movie itself, I've seen scarier things in the back of the fridge.

The trailer for The Thin Red Line made it look like an all-star action epic. Wrong again. Boring, pretentious crap, with most of the big names in tiny parts.

Then there are the trailers and ads that give away things that are obviously meant to surprise us. Wild Wild West, for example. A good portion of the movie is spent on speculation over what Loveless is doing with all of the engineers he's kidnapped. We've already seen the giant mechanical spider, so what's the point?

In Escape from LA, one of the best scenes was ruined because we already knew Snake would shoot everyone while the can was in the air. We might have suspected it, but being 100% certain is no fun. What's more, the TV had been saturated with it anyway. Instead of laughng and cheering in the theatre, it was murmurs of "oh yeah, this part."

I wonder if some movies would be better received if people had no expectations. Then again, we weren't shown much before the release of the American Godzilla, and it sucked. Of course, that was a redesign of a beloved character. Our expectations came from Toho.

Perhaps showing us the good scenes does bring us into the theatre initially, but would the movies not fare better in the long run if, instead of bait, they were saved as a reward for those who go?

Anyway, what other examples can people name of movies that were diminished by their advertising campaigns?

Flangepart

I just watched the dvd of "A fistfull of Dollars". The trailer opens with the very last shoot out in the flick! Where Clint guns down the lead bad guys, after the old boiler plate for armor trick. As you watch a movie, you can't help but count time, to determin when a scene will happen. To me, this helps undermine the story, more then i realised before. If you see the lead flunkey get the chop in the trailer, i often count time till he gets his. This can determin when other scenes eluded to in the trailer will happen. A good trailer should keep you from doing this. But, since the trailers need to wet your appitite fro the movie....just how should a trailer be done th accomplish this? "See that guy, Bernice? he gets blown up by Mel Gibson in the comming attractions, so we know he dies. Wanna make a side bet on how far into the movies he dies? You win, i make dinner, i win, i decide what dinner is! he,he...what do ya' mean, Go Fish?"

AndyC

That's exactly what bugs me. Rather than being entertained for the whole movie, and delighted when something big happens, I sit through the rest thinking "when is such-and-such going to happen?" Then, when it does, I've already seen it, so it does nothing for me.

slaX

One thing that really gets me in movie trailers is the way they piece stuff together sometimes
like when their is some dialect between say 2 actors and actor1 says something to actor2 and for actor2's response they cut to a different scene in the movie

I dunno I gave up on whats in the theaters now a long time ago and if I saw a trailer for an upcoming movie that looked really cool and that i'd wanna go see it'd be the first time in a long time.

AndyC

True, I hate when lines are used out of context to sound cool. It's very misleading.

Future Boy 3000

I agree. One bad example of this is the trailer for Zoolander. I enjoyed the movie and all, but the trailer showed most of the ending? What the hell?

One trailer which was really misleading (but it didn't ruin anything, considered it was a ass sandwich anyhow) was the trailer for Pearl Harbour. It made the movie look like this big stupid action film, but the truth is it was just a stupid movie with very little action.

Speaking of trailers, one good one was for A.I. (which I liked, even if it dragged at the end with the whole alien thing) Say what you will about the movie, but you gotta admit the trailer gave very little away. More trailers should be like that.

NeonNudel

There's two kinds of trailers shown in the theaters - and the best ones are usually the teaser trailers. These show only the smallest parts of the films (if a sequel, they may use old footage exclusively) and don't give much of anything away. For example, the teaser for Hannibal was a black background with the rules from Dr. Chilton in the first film "Do not approach the glass, do not tell him anything personal, never forget who he is" and when the screen faded to black, the next thing you saw was Hannibal Lecter's face. Or,  the teaser for Castaway - you saw Tom Hanks getting swept onto the island, screaming "Hello, anybody?" and that was pretty much it.

These teaser trailers are designed to get us interested in a movie without giving away any plot points. Those are the best kind.

Then, there are the longer, theatrical trailers that try to appeal to a wider audience by giving away more of the plot. I totally agree with the aforementioned comments because when everything is shown, you don't want to see it until rental time (if that).

I was totally psyched to see Castaway, but when I caught the second theatrical trailer (which revealed practically EVERYTHING, including that he got off the island!!!) I didn't care anymore because there was only about 2% of the film I didn't know about, and that doesn't justify spending almost 10 bucks to see it in the theater.

J.R.

I like watching the trailers on DVDs of movies from the '60s and '70s- the ads are like 8 minutes long! And they give away pretty much everything, even going deeper into charaacters and the story than the actual film does. One great example is Enter The Dragon. Lee-He's in it for revenge. Roeper- He's in it for the money. Jones- He's in it because he has to be.

J.R.

The funny thing is that ads today mange to be even stupider than trailers of yore. If I see one more ad that has each individual word of the sentence flying at you as the announcer says it, I'm going to kill some people. Can (woosh) You (woosh) Stand (woosh) The (Woosh) Heat? Equally annoying is ads for comedies that start out pretending to be dramatic (even though, given the announcer's tone and overall feel, anyone with the intelligence of a sea slug can tell what's coming) and then, a record scratch, and we see Adam Sandler, blubbering like a retard, spitting out Jell-O. That's another thing that must be abolished from trailers- record scratches.

Bicuitrocious

Record scratches... "From the Maker of PIECE OF CRAP"... "LAFFS"- Says Jerry Spumgurgler, LA Times... These all must go.
Sometimes silence in a trailer for suspense, or simply the score over little things here and there... The more of the movie's dialogue, generally the more that is spoiled.

The trailer is packaging for the feast. If we can smell the contents well enough to put the Insta-Mac-and-Spam back on the shelf, somebody screwed up.

The best trailer I've seen lately (probably the best movie, too):
Memento... It's bits of his phone conversation and quick snips of movie that give little away. The effect is pretty creepy. (If you haven't seen this... YOU MUST.)