There is a golden rule in the movie world: never trust a trailer. A trailer can greatly heighten your giddy enthusiasm only for the actual movie to drop you flat on your caboose. A trailer can also make you sacrifice a goat in honour of your pure hatred for it only for the actual movie be commercially and critically praised. Poor goat. Some of these trailer violations occur as a marketing tactic by experienced distributors. Others occur because a distributor was dropped on their head when they were a foetus. Trailers are not your friends. Here are the seven deadly sinners of the movie trailer underworld.
The underplayed trailer
The sin: lame trailer, great movie
Some distributors stick with a reliable strategy when formulating a trailer. Often this strategy is associated with bland or fairly terrible movies that cannot be sold on their artistic merits alone. Trying to sell a movie to a family-friendly market? Pair some generic, slapstick humour with a Top 40 music hit from yesteryear and you’re in the money. Problem is, everyone outside of that market will probably turn their nose up to it. Just look at the first trailer for Tangled.
Suffice to say, I was that snob who rejected Tangled the moment I saw this god-awful trailer. However, that distain slowly defused after the glut of positive word-of-mouth trickled my way. That’s partly why an underplayed trailer isn’t such a big threat. If you look around hard enough, you can avoid the negativity those trailers provoke. Oh, and for the record, Tangled is amazing.
The trailer that blows its wad
The sin: showing the movie’s highlight(s) in the trailer
Whenever a trailer blows its wad, it often means that movie isn’t very good. Comedies tend to be the biggest violators in this department, using their handful of decent jokes to sell you an hour and a half of painfully dull Sandler. It’s easy to have felt like you’ve been conned in these cases, and that’s because you have.
However, a wad-blowing trailer can also violate innocent movies. The trailer for Triangle (which I refuse to put into this post) gives away the movie’s most striking moment of freakish imagery (as well as an iatrical plot point). Upon watching the actual film, when you eventually reach this plot point, you are left wondering how awesome your face would have looked without that douchebag trailer spoiling the broth of your experience.
Here’s looking at you, Transformers 3.
The misleading trailer
The sin: completely missing the point of the movie
Some trailers are purposely designed to trick you. Confused distributors unable to decide on which angle to take the trailer simply decide to go perpendicular, creating a hypotenuse of confusion.
If you’re not following the geometry of this situation, let me put it simply: the trailer you saw is nothing like the movie you’re watching. It often occurs when a movie is so obtuse (sorry) or so complex that it’s often hard to define within two or three minutes. So, with the footage they’ve been given, they cut a trailer that almost completely misleads from the actual plot of the movie. Case in point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sQhTVz5IjQ
Now when I caught Ingalourierous Barstiereds in the cinema, there was a small group of 16-year-old dudes, clearly in it to see creative brutal acts of Nazi-cide. However, they quickly grew impatient the moment they realised there was more than five minutes of dialog. Can you blame them? The trailer splashes blood across the screen and pounds more bullets out that the actual movie does. Contrary to the trailer, The Basterds are only in half the movie. Those kids walked out after an hour.
The “You won’t believe how it ends!” trailer
The sin: telling the audience that there’s going to be a twist
These sneaky bastard trailers are not easy to spot. However, like that annoying friend who has already seen the movie and brags about how you’ll never see the ending coming, these trailers significantly change your mode of thinking when the film starts. It’s bad enough that the surprise is dampened by the mere fact that you know there’s a twist coming. But now, with every new scene, you can’t help but try to pick the ending, often coming up with fantastic scenarios that you pray to Buddha will happen, but inevitably never will. Of course, I’m assuming everyone’s as obsessive as I am. Which you’re probably not. I hope.
The most recent display of this subdued sin is from the Facebook thriller-mentary Catfish, equipped with quotes praising its surprise conclusion. It’s disappointing to have to sell a movie in this way, but it’s clear that Catfish probably wouldn’t have garnered much of its attention had it try pose as a “Guy searches for girl” doco. You’re subduing a sense of surprise for heightened interest. It’s an unfair trade, but an essential one nonetheless.
And then there’s this:
Sneaky bastards.
The spoiler trailer
The sin: blatantly showing your audience a major plot twist
Seen Terminator: Salvation? Tell me the major fault with this trailer:
Yep, we’re shown Sam Worthington as a robot-human hybrid, and I’m not just referring to his acting ability (Bazinga!). What would’ve made a fairly decent plot twist instead turned into the plot overview, solely due to this trailer. (By the way, “On May 21st, the end begins”? MAJOR spoiler)
What truly makes this a crime is that they had no foreseeable reason to add this part to the trailer. There was plenty of material in that disappointing quadquel to make a decent trailer out of. Why defuse a plot twist? It’s nearly as bad as telling us how the movie ends.
The trailer that tells you how the movie ends
The sin: telling you how the movie ends
Now we’re moving from the despicable moustache-twirling distributors to the dropped foetuses I mentioned earlier. It’s one thing to exploit a movie’s highlight or plot twist to generate excitement. It’s an entirely different matter to mention the freakin’ ending. Yes sir, it takes a special kind of stupid to really drop that ball/foetus. Exhibit A:
Oh, they rescue him. Well, so much for that then. Cast Away is still a very watchable movie with that fact in mind, but a whole dimension is lost when you assure the fact that he lives. Gone is any sort of fear or tension about this man’s survival, a dynamic that could’ve been easily concealed had it not been for this blasphemous trailer.
This may have you thinking about movies such as Titanic and 127 Hours. Based on true stories, the filmmakers take light of the fact that these stories are deep in public consciousness. An ending-based dynamic would not work (in the traditional sense). So, they create a movie keeping in mind that their audience know how it will end.
But back to the point, it seems downright moronic to try convince a market to watch a movie by telling them the ending. That’s like trying to sell someone a piece of KFC chicken by letting them eat the skin. Granted, this is a very rare sin for a trailer to commit, emphasizing why it’s a special kind of stupid. However, no trailer’s quite as special as…
The trailer that shows you the ending
The sin: showing you the f**king ending!
Yeah, it happens. A cinematic, unprecedented climax of a film shamelessly amputated to promote itself. Here’s a fresh victim:
This violation is pretty self explanatory, but it’s a real dick-move when you realise the damage it can do to unsuspecting victims. Imagine, getting excited about this flick from the trailer alone, that image of that woman getting dragged along the floor, absorbed by the darkness.
“What happens next? How does she get out of it? Oh, the credits…”
It’s a dirty filthy punch to the sack that leaves you walking funny long after the movie’s finished, leaving you that sickening empty feeling that only a fresh fist to the balls can provide. Again, this rarely happens, as Quarantine is a pretty unique example of a blatantly bad trailer. Still, it’s only the trailer they contaminated. It’s not like they’d repeat the same mista-
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-
The seven sins I’ve highlighted directly affect the experience we have when watching the full flick. I’m sure there are more annoyances concerning movie trailers that I didn’t address (feel free to list your own in the comments), but it’s the risk we take when we view these trailers. As movie lovers, we want a taste of the dish before we order. So we close our eyes, open our mouths and stomach what they give us (for better or worse). Sometimes it can distil a movie-going experience, but more often or not, it’ll generate that giddy excitement that us film geeks crave. You just need to keep one thing in mind: never trust a trailer. Or stuff you read on the internet for that matter.
Oh, by the way, this blog post contains spoilers.
