Cinematographer Jack Cardiff, 1929
There is only one word to describe the multitude of trailers rolling out this week: epic. Stunning visual effects, powerful film scores, and, most importantly, long run-times, are what make audiences flock to the theater summer after summer.
Honestly, it was hard for me to narrow down this week’s selection, but I have included as much as possible. This week also brings two new features designed to break up the monotony of Hollywood blockbusters.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II
As a fan, I couldn’t be more excited about this trailer. I literally watched it three times in a row. Honestly, as much as I love these books, I have always been cautious of the film franchise. Terrible pacing and poor character development were what was normally found in the Harry Potter films year after year, almost as if they were never designed to stand alone, but made exclusively for people who where already fan of the books.
But splitting this last book into two parts was a brilliant move. Even though it was most likely purely a marketing move to milk this franchise as long as possible, having two feature films has finally given the screenplay the room it needed to breath and to take the time to explore the relationships between the characters that make this fantastic world believable.
Looking directly at the trailer itself, we find it properly utilizing this new “epic trailer” structure that has been emerging recently, which consists of a 90 second theatrical trailer which ends with a dip in the music and poignant one-liner, only to explode into the final minute of epic montage footage set to the most powerful moments in the score, purely for the sake of being flashy. It is almost like the trailer is saying, ” This movie is too epic.”
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