Misleading Trailers

Excitement, amusement and bewilderment are three things that can come from watching a trailer. They began as a mere marketing tool, designed to get the word out about new films and entice people in with flashy special effects and big actors' names with "Academy Award-Winner" pasted over the top (Public Enemies, Above), but now trailers have turned a bit nasty.

It's not that there's anything particularly bad about them, but increasingly you find they mislead the viewer into making false assumptions. Take latest Dan Brown adaptation Angels and Demons for instance (here there be spoilers), in the trailer a chilling voiceover says "If god has issues, it won't be with what we've done, it will be with what we're about to do"

Nothing wrong with that you might say, and you're right, it's a decent quote to stick in a trailer as a dead body is chillingly uncovered on screen and conjures up questions for the viewer like: What are they going to do? Why? and Who are 'they'?

Once you get to the film itself however, this subterfuge reveals itself. Rather than a mysterious heinous act, the quote in fact refers to the simple act of murder. Furthermore the quote has been manipulated so the 'we' that was heard in the trailer is actually 'I' in the final print, instantly taking away all the mystery and suspense since it's obvious that a killer who's already killed and has three prisoners is likely to do so again.

Another example is Minority Report, where another line change changes the meaning of what's going on. In the trailer Colin Farrell's character Danny Withwer is in Pre-Crime HQ with Tom Cruise's John Anderton when he says "I've got a warrant in my pocket that says murder".

On the surface this is a pretty good line and sounds pretty cool, but after watching the film you find it makes no sense and is just untrue.

It makes you wonder how far this will go, there's been plenty of trailers or teaser trailers which have used scenes which were eventually deleted from the final cut (see Xmen 3's "We're not kids anymore" discussion), but surely manipulating lines is a slippery slope and could become a dangerous game of deception.

Will we eventually find films changing as radically as this:



If you haven't seen or heard of The Shining, then you could easily be fooled by something as simple as this, admittedly very well done, spoof.

We can only hope that film companies decide that we can, in fact, handle the truth.

Xmen Origins: Wolverine Review

Wolverine is cool, Hugh Jackman is cool (or hot, depending on your gender), so a film featuring both focusing on both should be a no-brainer, right? This was clearly the thought of Marvel bosses when they decided to launch into the Xmen Origins film series, currently at least two films, the second being focused on Ian McKellan's sublime Magneto.

As it turns out, the film reaches expectations, but goes little further. Wolverine is joined by a cast of fan favourites to make it more than just a one man show, notably Deadpool/Weapon XI (who's already been given the green light for his own spinoff) and Gambit.

X2's evil-nasty-man William Striker returns, this time embodied by Danny Huston, as Wolverine and big brother Sabretooth's (an excellent Liev Schreiber) way out of an exceptionally long military career. You do stop for a moment to wonder why no one seems to notice these recruits enlist for every major conflict in US history and never move up the ranks...

Confusing continuity aside, the brothers are soon among an elite group of mutants, a word muttered under-breath throughout the film, which serves to outline how early in mutant history we are here, there aren't going to be evil plots to mutate world leaders for some decades.

The prequel nature of the story lets us see some of the later mutants in their earlier years, such as a young Scott Summers (a.k.a. Cyclops) and a brief cameo from an even-more-digitally-de-aged Patrick Stewart as Professor X. This is all well and good, but does slightly distract from the general story.

The other supporting players in the story perform well overall. Gambit seems tragically underused, tacked on as a means to an end for our protagonist, and despite being very cool and quick to get back at the big bad Wolf after he's knocked out with a casual elbow to the face, you still feel like the story wouldn't have missed him.

Ryan Reynolds (NOT Ben Affleck as I stupidly assumed at first) put on an impressive turn as Wade Wilson, combining some excellent comic lines with some devastating katana moves in the opening act , and eventually being transformed into the Sylar equivalent of the Xmen universe: Deadpool. There's confusion here since in the comic books Weapon XI and Deadpool were too very different characters, but in the film the two have been combined.

Jackman has maintained countless times in interviews the fact that this film should take the character to a place where he could walk off-screen at the end and walk into the bar where we meet him at the beginning of Xmen.

This is unlikely to remain however, since the teasing out-scenes, now an expectation of the Xmen movies, show Logan drinking in Japan trying to remember who he is. The tragedy of amnesia is that it almost makes the entire film pointless, as everything he's learned, suffered and sacrificed are lost along with his memories, but from a storytelling perspective it's very handy, since it neatly explains why he doesn't recognise Sabretooth as his brother in Xmen 1, for example.

The film overall is a healthy blend of action, emotion, mystery and some more action thrown in. It's a worthy beginning to Wolverine's tale, and sets itself up nicely for a sequel which could bring to life Sin City scribe Frank Miller's stories of Wolverine in Japan.

In terms of the 'Origins' aspect, it doesn't take away from the endearing mystery of Wolverine as a character to know what happened in his past that he can't remember, but the adamantium process, frequently flash-backed in the first two X films, seemed a lacklustre affair compared to the scenes of Jackman covered in blood, desperately trying to escape Alkali Lake amid primal screams.

If you compare this film to the trilogy it bobs around about the same standard as the franchise's debut, with X2 sailing in front and poorly subtitled The Last Stand trailing, aptly, in third. The effort put into the film, but that and its fairly predictable story are let down by a few jarring visual effects, which at times seem set to appeal the videogame generation.

Definitely worth checking out for fans of the series and the genre as a whole, but lacking in enough substance to draw in new viewers who aren't already trapped by the invincible Adamantium claws.