I’m not much of a sports fan. In fact, I’d go so far as to call myself a sports apostate; I live in New England and yet my interest in football and hockey is next to nil and my interest in basketball and baseball is mild at best. (Though I do like baseball. Frankly, I think that’s New England’s true favored regional sport, or at least Boston’s, but I may be the minority on both counts.) So it might not surprise you to learn that I tend to watch the Super Bowl only for trailer spots if I watch it at all. This year, I only bothered to catch the last ten minutes of the game, but that’s okay– everything’s up on Youtube for us to mull over.
So let’s get started with this extensive/extended look at Iron Man 3, which tells us little that we didn’t already know about the film but at least shows off a few new shots here and there of Don Cheadle’s Iron Patriot, Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin blowing stuff up, a shot of Guy Pearce, and voice-over stuff from the last teaser. It’s kind of scattered and it’s cut chaotically, but there’s a huge upside to all of that: we get to see most of a full segment where Stark scrambles to save people falling out of Air Force One after the plane is attacked in mid-air. It’s a nice little beat, and between it and Kingsley’s dulcet tones, my interest in the film has picked up a bit:
I can’t say the same for the World War Z teaser, which neither shows nor tells us anything new about the movie. For me, that actually speaks volumes and confirms my suspicions that this is going to be a big heaping pile of clean, safe, boring “horror” crafted for an audience comprised of teenagers. Maybe future promotional material for the movie will actually advertise it as zombie fare. If so, then I might decide to start caring. In the meantime, color me nonplussed:
The same goes for Fast & Furious 6, but that’s mostly because I’ve just never bothered getting into this series– which I understand is mostly worthless– and not because I have any ill feelings about the movie itself. This could be the entry that gets me to go back and watch the franchise from start to finish, though the idea of sitting through one Rob Cohen movie, one Jon Singleton movie, and three Justin Lin movies just to prepare for, well, another Justin in movie sounds exhausting. Still, car chases involving tanks and the Rock are nothing to sneeze at:
I’ll be honest, I’ve been wavering on Oz the Great and Powerful since the first trailer hit. On the one hand, it looks like it has the potential to be the movie that Alice in Wonderland so utterly failed to be; the design here is eye-catching and the color palette wide, varied, and quite lovely. On the other hand, it’s the same kind of film as Alice in Wonderland, and while Sam Raimi doesn’t work at the same low level of narrative craft as Tim Burton, the similarities between the two are hard to deny and the association gives me some pause. This little spot suggests a lot more of the potential positives than negatives, so I’m still tentatively on-board, but with slight reservations:
I still can’t muster much interest in The Lone Ranger at all. At this point my only hope for the film is that Armie Hammer comes out of it unscathed, but everything about this project suggests the kind of gaping commercial maw that can swallow up a young actor’s career and doom him to a lifetime of bad studio projects. Maybe I’m being aggressively pessimistic here, but “from the maker and star of Pirates of the Caribbean,” doesn’t make for an appealing selling point:
And saving the best– or the most anticipated– for last, we come to the latest blip for Star Trek Into Darkness, a film I am both eagerly awaiting and dreading in equal measure. As with most of the Super Bowl trailers, this tells us almost nothing new, except that,
a) Cumberbatch is “better at everything“, and
b) The Enterprise gets totally mangled and busted up
The first detail is probably the most interesting, at least if you’re a huge hypocrite like me who kvetches about Abrams’ rumor-mongering and fan speculation but also can’t help but engage in that sort of stuff. If you’ve been following the back-and-forth over the identity of the film’s villain, this line could be a really big clue– especially if you’re a supporter of the idea that Benedict’s character benefits from genetic alterations of one sort or another. All I can say is that I’m still getting big whiffs of past Trek films in every teaser I see, which doesn’t fill me with confidence in Abrams’ creativity and originality, but he made Star Trek ’09 work, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt as much as I can:
There you have it– the six major Super Bowl trailers, all collected for your viewing pleasure. Now I’ve got to ask: which of these is your favorite? Sound off below!