It was a week ago when I talked about the then just released second trailer for “The Adventures of Tintin”. Since then it has been a very busy time on the previews front with a lot of first look trailers having gone online, so I thought now is a good point to recap them in case you missed any of them.
Of course two of them I can’t include here – “The Dark Knight Rises” and “The Avengers”. Both have had bootleg copies – poorly filmed with a camera inside a cinema – leak online in the past few days. However I try to avoid linking to crappy bootlegs on the site. HD versions of both, and the about to be released “The Amazing Spider-Man” teaser, should be going online this coming week and will be linked as soon as they are.
In the meantime this past week saw the arrival of trailers for four major films opening later this year and two early next year. Mostly good trailers as well to wash away the taste of the horrendous look at “Jack and Jill” the Friday before last.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Guy Ritchie’s first take on Holmes upset some purists, not sure why as there’s been countless stately and inventive adaptations of Doyle’s creation from Jeremy Brett to Benedict Cumberbatch they can fall back on. As a Holmes fan myself I found it more fun, loyal to the tone and clever than I expected.
This enjoyable teaser trailer for the sequel promises more of the same, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Downey and Law’s chemistry still seems great, they’ve removed the surprisingly weak link of the original (Rachel McAdams) and brought in a more suitable replacement (Noomi Rapace) along with a promising villain (Jared Harris).
There’s a large amount of gun fetishism and slow mo here, but there was in the original so no big surprise there. It probably won’t convert any new fans who didn’t warm to the first film, but it should go over a blast with those who got a kick out of it. The only real disappointment is that there is no glimpse of Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes.
John Carter
“Conan the Barbarian in Space,” “He-Man” or “Prince of Persia 2” are the descriptions flying about for Disney’s first look at Andrew Stanton’s cinematic take on author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ other famous heroic creation after Tarzan.
It’s pretty, the music is stylish, it’s obviously ambitious – but most of all it’s damn confusing. The Mars scenes look a hell of a lot like Arizona or Nevada, making the differentiation between them and the Civil War-era Earth-set scenes very difficult to distinguish aside from the odd flash of spacecraft or a tiny appearance by an alien right out of the “Star Wars” prequels.
While the literary ‘John Carter’ may have preceded pretty much all other sci-fi adventure stories, what we see here feels quite familiar even if it is a jumble. The gratuitous shirtlessness of Taylor Kitsch is a welcome sight, but certainly puts the “Prince of Persia” comparisons front and center. It’s enough to get me curious, but still a long way off from ‘selling’ me on the film yet.
The Thing
A prequel to the original portraying the events on the Norwegian Antarctic base? That may be the intent, however the trailer hints at the project being possibly more along the lines of a remake of the original John Carpenter classic – a few changes to be sure, the most visible being less of the fun macho bravado between the all alpha male cast of the original.
Yet the production design is quite faithful, the use of the music is well done, there’s some obvious CG but quite a bit of practical on display as well. The gore is limited, but trailers aren’t allowed to show it so that’s understandable.
My hope was cautiously optimistic before and the trailer hasn’t changed that outlook. It mentions from the producers of the ‘Dawn of the Dead’ remake, a comparison which is probably the best we can hope for here – a fun film that stands on its own but doesn’t take away from that original’s uniqueness, power and place in the genre.
Hugo
This is a Martin Scorsese film? The trailer certainly doesn’t look like any Scorsese film we’ve seen, rather something more akin to a Robert Zemeckis or even Chris Columbus movie. Scorsese’s first attempt at a big budget family film delivers a 3D fantasy tale set around a railway station that seems squarely aimed at the kids and looks very much like any number of generic kid lit adaptations we’ve seen in recent years.
There’s a solid cast but while the two young leads look quite strong, the adults seem disappointing with Sacha Baron Cohen’s character appearing almost painfully bad. The effects may be quite good but the “comedy” is anything but. It was a project I was curious about, but this poorly edited trailer has shot that curiosity in the foot.
The Pirates! Band of Misfits
You’ve heard of sleeper hits, how about sleeper trailers? In the space of under 24 hours this film went from practically non-existent on the radar to one of the more anticipated films of the first few months of 2012. While Aardman Animation’s CG animated effort “Flushed Away” was a minor let down, their stop motion efforts “Chicken Run” and the “Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit” remain great features.
Now comes their third film and in less than one day the studio has released both a more conventional two-minute U.S. trailer and a one-minute sea chanty-driven U.K. trailer. Both trailers remind us of the fun which the pirate genre hasn’t really seen since the first “Pirates of the Caribbean”. The U.S. one starts with a truly great joke, while the U.K. one is just damn catchy. The animation is superb, the voice cast is damn strong – it all makes this look like a winner.
Contagion
Only two months before release and we finally get what will likely be the only trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s impressively cast pandemic thriller. It’s a solid trailer too, a tense piece that starts with its best foot forward, namely Gwyneth Paltrow dying in obvious pain. Then it becomes something more akin to a “28 Days Later” style film with empty streets, piles of bodies, etc.
There’s an obvious limit on the budget – much of the film looks to be discussions in board rooms, hotel rooms and conference rooms with only the odd flash outside to give us a glimpse of the larger threat. The graphics are oddly amateur as well, still – should be a better than average early Fall effort.
About The Critic
