I’m reviewing two new trailers at the same time. This should tell you how little I have to say about both.
This week the first “big” trailer dropped for Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, an attempt to bring the Beast Wars into the movieverse, and The Flash, an attempt to use Flashpoint to abandon a failed attempt by DC to rip off the MCU. Trailers are supposed to get us hyped for the actual movie, to get us ready to see it. That’s getting tougher and tougher as Hollywood appears to be trying to bury geek media, science fiction continues to get darker in tone and visually so the sun only exists as a metaphor before going back into the darkness, and directors continue to be outright hostile to the source material because they only want to use the easy marketing of the famous name to push their script and sometimes also their agenda, using the various cultural “shields” to deflect criticism of their bad stories or their terrible adaptations.
Now before anyone, and I’m getting tired of having to add this disclaimer because it should be a given, gets on my case about “well, you don’t know the movie’s going to be bad”, let me ask you what a trailer is for. Hint: I already told you in the previous paragraph. I’m not judging the movie, I’m judging what they think will make us want to see the movie. There’s only so much time in my day, I have movies and shows I have wanted to watch but never got the chance, plus all the comics and books to read and audio dramas to listen to. Additionally I write articles like this, make comics, and if at all possible organize the crap in my house all while trying to get back into video production. I also need to sleep, go to the bathroom, make contact with other human beings so I don’t write the same kind of echo chamber characters we get now, and all the other things people tend to do in a day. My time, and especially my decreasing budget, is limited so the trailer has to convince me to use up some of that valuable time to see these movies. Do they?
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