To what that we are owed this disservice? This is what I asked myself while watching the newest trailer for Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.
I think that it largely is an instinct to remain neutral in the face of movies that have yet to be released. However, I’d like to take a critical eye towards theatrical advertisements.
A trailer is supposed to provide enticement. At its basic and most simple, a movie trailer is supposed to make me feel something as a viewer — “I want to go, spend my money and time to watch the entirety of this movie.”
When I finished the trailer for Spider-Man’s newest debut on screen (despite that he has been in movie syndication every few years for the last 20 years), I came away with the exact opposite feeling.
I don’t want to see this movie because I feel like I already have. Ridiculous as it may sound, I advise anyone who wants to watch this movie to avoid all advertisements.
Audiences deserve to feel enticed, they would be more than happy to accept the movie is good, or that it’s worth seeing, but the effect of a trailer itself is to present those ideas to the audience and make you as a viewer say “yeah, it looks good, maybe I will watch it.” However, it shouldn’t come at a cost of exposing the broad narrative elements of the movie itself.
I would be shocked if audiences have any doubt in their minds about what would occur in this movie. I had little doubt of what the movie’s plot would be after only hearing rumors.
After watching the trailer, I was all but convinced that this movie will hold no special moment that I haven’t seen in the trailer, beyond a reactionary response to a blended fandom of depictions of a spider bitten kid who lives in New York. Beyond that, I don’t think anyone imagined it would go any other way.
Furthermore, Marvel possesses — for reasons which I have yet to grasp — an immeasurable amount of cultural currency. Essentially, producing these movies is like printing money regardless of how expensive they are to make. So with that premise in mind, the thought comes back to the trailer.
Why even have a trailer? What if a movie had only a poster? What if that movie had no trailer, one poster, except you knew the intellectual property inside and out.
It’s a Spider-Man movie. Spider-Man has not substantially changed in depiction in many years. If at all. We may know the cast list, the director, the production company, we may even be able to compare the other movies that the production company has made, to this new film. However, we will never see a single frame of the film.
I’m of two minds in this endeavor. It either fails spectacularly because nobody is going to see that it has been released or seeing the movie will provide nothing but the most holistic and fully entrenching viewing that films can possess.
The capacity to surprise, and allow a suspension of disbelief that these movies have failed to achieve for the last decade.
Perhaps it was the advent of Marvel’s seasoning of ‘clever’ dialogue, in which a boring and overused dry-wit constantly dominates nearly every interaction between characters. That small sudden moment in which inevitably, regardless of any circumstance, completely disparages itself for the sake of some cheap and quick in your face line or moment that removes you from all of the stakes.
I come away from the trailer knowing I will be dragged to watch the movie while also correctly guessing the ending two hours before the credits roll.
It feels like a moment that should fill me with childish joy and excitement when it actually feels like more of a waste.
Watching this trailer, I know everything I needed to know about the movie to write this entire article which is a very upsetting revelation to say the least.