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Although it’s not the focus of this piece, please allow me to unceremoniously dump on “Spider-Man 3.” I thought it was horrible; an over-stuffed jumble of ideas, causing what should have been the satisfying conclusion of a story three movies in the making to take a back seat to whiz-bang action and special effects that didn’t look nearly good enough for what they cost. It was the very definition of “film by committee” and the first, big disappointment of the summer season.
Of course, you never would have guessed that from the trailer. On the contrary, the previews for “Spider-Man 3” were dark and exciting, promising things the final product couldn’t hope to live up to. I can remember when the first teaser was released on the internet many months ago. I was ecstatic, a huge smile plastered on my face, and I must have watched the damn thing fifteen times in a row. Looking back on it, I probably got more entertainment out of the advertising for “Spider-Man 3” than I did the movie itself. The same could be said of the trailers for “X-Men: The Last Stand” a year ago, which were so shrewdly cut together to highlight all the best moments while hiding all the lame ones. Ditto “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” ditto “Superman Returns,” ditto “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith,” etc., etc., etc.
Movie trailers are certainly nothing new; they’ve been around, in some form or another, for almost as long as movies have. Since the dawn of the Internet Age, however, their importance has magnified. Trailer watching is almost a sport now, and we all sit at our computers compulsively checking YouTube or Yahoo Movies for the latest breaking preview. We judge a film instantly, deciding if it’s worth our ten bucks, based on three measly minute of footage. The second it’s over we start crying out for the next one, and between all the trailers, clips, and TV spots out there, it’s a wonder there’s any part of a movie we haven’t seen come release day. We’re always hungry for new material, and when we don’t get it we become bitter. There are people already clamoring for the trailer for “The Dark Knight,” the “Batman Begins” sequel, and the movie has barely even started filming. Likewise, people can’t wait to see what Heath Ledger’s Joker will look like, and in lieu of an official photo being released, people started manufacturing fakes. (An official picture was finally released this past weekend in an advertising campaign so bizarre it warrants a whole column of its own.) We’ve become a society that wants everything right now, and because of this we’ve forgotten that, oftentimes, the waiting is more exciting than the reward.
Lest you think I’m preaching, allow me to confess: I’m one of the biggest culprits when it comes to this kind of stuff. An obscene amount of my day is spent staring at a computer screen searching for the latest casting news, or the new, exclusive pic. I’ll watch thirty minutes of clips on a movie that’s coming out the next day. I’m impatient and over-hyped, and I can’t help but suspect that I might have enjoyed “Spider-Man 3” a little more if I hadn’t been so engrained in the film. Each picture and clip I looked at was a promise and, while the film could still have been much better, when I finally saw it I had expectations that it couldn’t possibly have lived up to. They say that ignorance is bliss, and in this case perhaps they were right. Powered by AkoComment 2.0! |
