RogerBW's Blog

Some trailers I've seen recently, and my thoughts on them. (Links are to youtube. Opinions are thoroughly personal. I still hate everything.)

Space Jam - A New Legacy: look, we have bought up a whole load of other people's work! Just like Ready Player One (also Warner) and Wreck-It Ralph Too (Disney)! Bow down before your eternally-copyrighted overlords! Oh, and there's some sportsball or something.

Black Widow: if you can survive drops and collisions like that, why is a threatened drop any sort of threat? Feels as though it's trying to have its action cake and eat it, but apart from that it engages my attention rather better than the run of the mill superhero film.

Mainstream: …so…? What do you have to say? If anything?

Monster: yeah, maybe? At least there's more than just spectacle here.

Together Together: let's reinvent telegony, just as it had been stamped out everywhere except dog breeders and the Russian Orthodox church. Yech.

The Unthinkable: yeah, but this just gives the easy stuff. Is there character? Is there story?

Those Who Wish Me Dead: who wouldn't want to be in a fire tower for months on end? But generic criminals are generic.

The Woman in the Window: so it's Rear Window plus paranoia plus "is the woman crazy". If there were one plot I could ban… no, it would be "the tough guy doesn't do that any more until he does one last time". But maybe after that it would be "everyone thinks the woman is crazy".

The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard: I suppose if you like this kind of comedy. Perhaps I'm over-sensitive to "she's female in a mildly unconventional way and therefore intrinsically funny". But I'm happy with that.

Riders of Justice: middle-aged white men can do whatever they like if they can justify it.

Army of the Dead: Zack Snyder is a pretty toxic name for me these days. He hasn't yet been MeToo-ed (though given the consistent attitude to women shown in his films it's surely only a matter of time). He does a thing, and he does it very well, but it really isn't my thing. This time: all the standard heist movie clichés, plus the Apocalypse Now Huey against an orange sky, plus zombies.

Blast Beat: you young people with your dreams and ideals.

F9: at this point all the trailer needs to say is "there's another filim in this series". Physics, she left the building several films ago.

The Water Man: one of these days, someone's going to make a film about a man who wants to bring his wife back from the dead and simply, quietly, gets on with it without turning evil or suffering ironic cosmic punshment. It will be a commercial failure.

The Dry: looks unremittingly grim.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Teaser): all this trailer has to say is "we made a martial arts film, and it looks an awful lot as though it's derived from a fighting game". It's not, apparently; this protagonist is a Marvel superhero. Well, who isn't? But this is a Marvel superhero from the 1970s, before most Westerners had seen HK action films; now we have easy access to those, so why would we want this? Oh, apparently "Chinese people are bad drivers" is a standard thing racist Americans say, so there's that too.

Here Today: all is stereotype. And everything is framed in terms of what the old white man wants.

The Conjuring - The Devil Made Me Do It: this series carries on celebrating the serial fraudsters Ed and Lorraine Warren by drawing randomly from the bag of horror film clichés, and I carry on not watching it.

Luca: pretty much exactly what one had been led to expect by the teaser.

The Misfits: cool criminals do cool crimes and they're the good guys. This looks as though it's all hanging off Brosnan, and he left his acting brain at home that day because there wasn't room for it among all the SFX; but I hope I'm wrong, because it could be great fun.

The Tomorrow War (Teaser): I have many questions, including "how can this possibly work".