Movie trailers

[avram]

Just saw the trailer for the upcoming I, Robot movie, and it looks terrible. I don’t just mean that the trailer depicts a movie that seems to miss the essence of Asimov’s stories, although that’s also true. (A better trailer in that respect would have spent a little more time emphasizing how important the Laws of Robotics are, and how dramatic it is that a robot seems to have killed someone.) It’s also just chock full of really stupid and unfunny character bits, attempts at comedy that just fall flat. The movie’s clearly not a comedy, so why do they have to spend so much time telling us (badly) that Will Smith’s character is a funny guy?

The trailer for Van Helsing makes it look like it might be stupid, but it’ll deliver serious supernatural-butt-kicking bang for your moviegoing buck.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

It's a bad trailer. It's trying very hard to make this look like Another Will Smith Smartass Comedy, but it also looks like it took every piece of comedy in the entire film and put it in the trailer. The opening of the trailer is slow and stilted. That's just bad trailer-making, and I have no idea what the film will actually be like, or even if it will be even slightly good.

(Strangely, what this reminds me of was seeing a trailer for the Nathan Lane/Robin Williams The Birdcage which was edited to make it look like a Robin Williams Zany movie. Which it emphtically isn't; Williams gracefully spends most of the film as the straight man while Nathan Lane gets most of the jokes and Hank Azaria pegs out the camp-o-meter.)

[avram]

Yeah, probably a bad movie, but definitely a bad trailer. It’s about a third of the way through before you get any hint of what the movie’s supposed to be about, and it’s not like that first third sets up any sort of surprising payoff which would justify it.