Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Top 5: Crap Films with Amazing Trailers

Movie crowd

Trailers are an art form unto themselves.  They sell the film more than any other form of marketing.  Sometimes a trailer is so good that it’s a mini-film of its own.  The very best leave you completely assured that when you walk into the movie it’s advertising, you’re going to walk out a fist-pumping veteran of a crucial, life-altering movie experience.  However, sometimes that awesome trailer that you watched 100 times to amp up for the movie, turns out to be much better than the actual final product.  Here are five, in order of release, which wrote a check they couldn’t cash (though that doesn’t mean the trailers still aren’t fantastic if you can erase the memory of the actual film).

 1. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) dir. by George Lucas


Before we knew what midichlorians, pod racing or Gungans were, we got our first peek at new Star Wars footage for the first time in 16 years and every person in that theater was completely quiet, studying every frame.  UNTIL Darth Maul ignited the second blade on his saber, and then you could have scraped the lot of us off of the ceiling.  It’s easy in retrospect to see red flags, but not many of us walked in expecting anything less than awesomeness.

 2. Where the Wild Things Are (2009) dir. by Spike Jonze


This is still one of the best trailers I’ve ever seen.  The song, by the way, is “Wake Up” by Arcade Fire, which needs to be compulsory listening for all people all the time.  Where the Wild Things Are was one of my favorite books as a child.  Maurice Sendak got the misfit, bestial energy of little boys, and this two-minute trailer is a much better adaptation than the full go.  A book with 37 sentences in it needs a whole lot of padding to reach a two-hour film.  This book didn’t need it.  The trailer did the job and still does; capturing the iconic imagery and themes of the book with the perfect marriage of Arcade Fire’s best song.

 3. Sucker Punch (2011) dir. by Zack Snyder


In 2011, Zack Snyder was coming off 300 and Watchmen and was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood.  Sucker Punch was a mystery film, but though it was completely confusing as a trailer, there were giant samurai fights, steampunk Nazi battles, science fiction cities, and an amazing dragon.  Check, check, check and check.  What I should have paid closer attention to was the trailer’s own warning “You will be unprepared”….for how deeply creepy (not in a good way) this film is.  The fantasy vignettes in the film are visually stunning action pieces.  It’s what connects them that is super, super…..no, “creepy” is the precise word.

 4. Prometheus (2012) dir. by Ridley Scott


Ridley Scott returning to the Alien franchise after what it had endured since 1986 seemed to be perfect, and this trailer cemented it.  This was a sure thing.  It looked gorgeous, had a great cast, and it looked like we were in for a terrifying introduction to where the xenomorphs originated.  What we got was a ponderous, question filled, few answers given, cryptic mess.  The aliens are tadpoles?  Does that make them amphibians?  Why is that a thing that even popped into my head?  Probably because I spaced out while someone trudged down a corridor for another 10 minutes.  And it’s STILL better than Alien: Covenant.

 5. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) dir. by Ben Stiller


Much like the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are, this works almost as a music video, this time to “Dirty Paws” by Of Monsters and Men.  If you’ve never read the short story, it’ll take you 15 minutes and it’s brilliant, and the same problems that sunk Wild Things did so in Mitty.  This two-minute short film tells you the story of a repressed, bored, lonely man who dreams of doing great things and then one day sets off and does them.  It accomplishes it with almost no dialogue.  It remains a fantastic trailer and all of the movie you ever need to see.

Revisiting all of these has my emotions in this place:
Disney Pixar's Inside Out

 

4 thoughts on “Top 5: Crap Films with Amazing Trailers”

  1. You don’t have the worst offender of all time on here: the first Adams Family movie. I know that one takes us back into ancient history, but the trailer was so good that I’m still reeling from the disappointment. Also, after watching the trailer for The Mask, I was expecting a much better movie than it turned out to actually be. The trailer made it look like a neo-nior directed by Tex Avery, instead of a generic comedy filled with gangster movie cliches, and about a minute and a half of special effects spread out through the film. And half the effects shots were in the trailer.


    If you have a dicey film on your hands, by all means make it look good. By building it up into a masterpiece though, you engender actual bad will, even if you buy a great opening weekend.

    All your choices here are excellent. You know that I really am a fan of the prequels, but there were no red flags leading up to the release of TPM. Imagine if we had been on the receiving end of the movie promised by that trailer. Isn’t it funny that none of us ever doubted for an instant?

    (wipes away wistful tear)

    The most aggravating movie here is Walter Mitty. I still don’t know what happened. If you’re going to make the movie you made, make it, but don’t make me believe it’s going to be some kind of pop-surrealist oscar contender. You know exactly what you did, marketers. Arrrgggh.


    I thought Where The Wild Things Are was wonderful at the time, but I’ve had the chance to watch it again since then, only to realize I would rather be pickled alive by space aliens than rewatch. So maybe not so wonderful.

    If marketers sleep at night, they shouldn’t.


    Liked by 1 person

  2. Interesting topic and list. I especially agree about Prometheus. In my opinion, To the Wonder (2012) and a A Dangerous Method (2011) also have some of the most effective and beautifully put trailers where movies just were mehh.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Hello,
    Pleasure to meet you and thank you for taking time to visit my blog page and having a follow. I love, love, love movies, so love that your blog is about movies in all aspects. Some of the movies on this list, I don’t believe I have seen and the others, I remember vaguely. lol.. which means I either didn’t like it or fell asleep to it or possibly was multitasking and didn’t have a chance to actually watch it without disruption.

    Shay-lon


    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s