Want to see the latest trailers and hear what we’ve got to say about them?
Tough. Here it is anyway!
With SDCC 2015 over once and for all, we thought we’d kick off our new FIRST LOOK… SECOND THOUGHTS trailer review column with a special SDCC Movie Trailer special! Be sure to jump in the comments and let us know how right or wrong we are!
But really. We’re right.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
[youtube https://youtu.be/0WWzgGyAH6Y]
This trailer is so serious. There’s a lot of pontificating in angry voices, and Ben Affleck angrily glaring so hard he probably pooped his pants a little. There’s Ma Kent (Diane Lane) telling Clark that he doesn’t owe the world a thing, and a goofy-assed Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) chanting the frankly stupid “The red capes are coming” over and over again.
The music is dour and low-key, there’s a lot of darkness and paranoia; and then we get some flashes of action that make it look like Gal Gadot might actually be all right as Wonder Woman, and that Batman vs Superman (Henry Cavill) will be more visually dynamic and emotionally satisfying than anything that happened in Man of Steel.
That glimpse of Zod’s corpse and Luthor molesting a piece of kryptonite are intriguing but whoever cut this trailer is still holding back shots of Jason Momoa‘s Aquaman and Ezra Miller‘s Flash. That’s probably for the best, really.
And while it was good to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan briefly appear as Thomas Wayne, it seems like a waste. It’s nowhere near the quality of cameo that we used to get with Batman movies (remember Pee Wee and Simone as the Penguin’s parents?) and just serves to remind me that he would probably have been a better choice for Batman this time around.
Overall, I’m underwhelmed, but more intrigued than I’ve been so far. Stock up on anti-depressants before checking this one out.
Suicide Squad
[youtube https://youtu.be/PLLQK9la6Go]
Take a great comic, a director with a tendency to wallow in LA law enforcement melodrama, an “all-star” cast, and a studio that has forgotten how to make fun movies, mix them all together and throw it at the screen and see what sticks. That’s pretty much what Suicide Squad is; a mish-mash of marketing ideas, dirt, and sleaze.
Warner Bros. (the studio apparently run by and for Dudebros) once again sucks all the joy and perverse energy from its comic book source materials, apparently forgetting that even the movie that inspired this basic concept, The Dirty Dozen, was funny and disturbed all at the same time.
Will Smith plays Will Smith, Ben Affleck cameos as Batman, Jared Leto appears in what is simply the worst Joker to ever make it past the design stage, and Margot Robbie gets top billing as Harley Quinn – who is now apparently a stripper or something who is kept in a cage inside a cage furnished with only some straps to hang from and practice her erotic dancing. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is unrecognizable as another poorly designed Bat-Villain, Killer Croc.
Hopefully that means he’ll be available to play a real character that people will give a shit about someday. He deserves better.
Actually, now that I think about it, everybody in this cast deserves better.
The audience deserves better.
The Dudebros don’t though. This is all for them.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
[youtube https://youtu.be/w_Ky4KPzKwY]
“How’s that for entertainment?” indeed.
This trailer is like a master class in just how schizophrenic Warner Bros. is with their properties. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a television series running from 1964-1968 starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum as US and Russian operatives teaming up to defend world peace. It was fun and stylish and something all fans of fun, stylish, spy-jinks should be aware of.
Warner Bros. nabbed genius director Guy Ritchie (genius might be hyperbole, but he’s never made a film that wasn’t worth seeing – Swept Away never happened! It NEVER HAPPENED!) and decided to give Henry Cavill a role that allowed him to act and have fun and not stand around posing with various types of frowns on his face all the time. Armie Hammer is along for the ride, with Alicia Vikander, Hugh Grant, and Jared Harris making up the rest of the cast.
Ritchie’s pop editing and frenetic action sequences are on full-display, along with enough wit, charm, and sex appeal to make every single person in the audience happy and a little aroused.
Whoever put this film together needs to be given the reins of WB’s comic book properties. Imagine if Superman or Batman were fun again!
This one is a must-see.
Deadpool (Leaked)
Of all the trailers to come out of SDCC this year, I think this is the most viscerally satisfying and true to the vision of the source material.
Ryan Reynolds is finally going to play the role he was born to play. Granted, he already played this character once, but I’m pretty sure everyone on the planet has just agreed to pretend X-Men Origins: Wolverine never happened.
We’ve got the introduction of a Colossus (Andre Tricoteux) who might finally have some agency in the X-Men movie universe, along with Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) – a character I’m not personally familiar with, but want to love just based on her name. There’s also a brief callback to the Deadpool short that kicked off all the new excitement about this character (and was partially responsible for the film getting greenlit), and tons and tons of dirty jokes and bloodshed.
That’s how you do it, Warner Bros. That’s how you do it.
X-Men: Apocalypse (Leaked)
[youtube https://youtu.be/hdVaTIjMdac]
The X-Men: Apocalypse trailer is a mixed bag, which should come as no surprise, as just about every X-Men movie made so far has had a healthy dose of good and bad thrown together in a jumbled mix that sometimes we can forgive (X2), but sometimes we cannot (X-Men Origins: Wolverine). After the joyful return of Bryan Singer to the franchise with his time-traveling epic X-Men: Days of Future Past, Apocalypse promises another big story with lots of characters and lots of comic book goodness.
It’s also got one of the worst character designs in modern superhero movie history with the embarrassingly Power Rangers look of the titular Apocalypse. To quote Magneto from the trailer, “Who the fuck are you?”
Actually that’s a bit too insulting to the Power Rangers.
That aside, X-Men: Apocalypse has chosen to stay in the past, setting the film not too terribly long after Days of Future Past, and recast characters like Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Scott Summers (Tye Sheridan) and Jean Grey (Game of Thrones‘ Sophie Turner) with younger, more future-franchise-friendly actors to pair up with return youngsters Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Evan Peters, and Lucas Till.
The trailer is filled with signs and portents of world-destroying acts of violence, along with some old-school villain speechifying by Apocalypse (the first mutant, who’s been around for centuries, worshipped as a god here and there by simple folk). To be honest, there’s not a lot here that looks interesting or even exciting.
Not counting Mohawk Storm, of course, who is AWESOME.