In a fascinating experiment with the phenomenon of too-much-info movie trailers, a movie critic writes his review of the movie “21“ based solely on the movie’s preview. Using only the information released by the studio (including the characters’ names found on imdb.com), he was able to review the entire story arc, take a well-educated stab at the ending, and make a plausible argument for the quality of the flick. Then, the following day when the movie was actually released, he watched a screening and then posted an update to his critique with anything he may have gotten wrong.
Sadly, the review of the preview was actually more complimentary than the one of the movie itself, and was pretty darned spot-on as to the plot details. With a few minor revisions which seemed to be due to deliberately deceptive editing in the preview, the two reviews are the same except that it appears we got the better version of the movie in the trailer.
This method of getting people to go to the theater and watch your crappy movie seems so obvious, so pathetically transparent and so easily avoided that I wonder why the studios are still doing it. Anyone who watches a trailer like that might thing, “Hey, that looks like a fun movie. Maybe I’ll go see it.” Then when the movie comes out, wait one day or less and read a review or two, find out if the trailer was being manipulative or not, and then make a decision about whether or not to plop down ten bucks to watch the thing. A boring, badly-made movie isn’t going to be made into a blockbuster by a faux-exciting trailer, and no matter how much the studio plasters the trailer across websites and cable stations, it can’t hide behind the trailer when it is released in all its redundant glory.
Worse is when a preview for a comedy comes out, and you laugh your head off for the 60-second duration, and when it’s over you realize that you probably got every laugh out of the movie that you’re going to get. Cheap entertainment, yes, but sad to think that this valuable form of advertising has been watered down into nothing more than misleading freak show teasers – see the horse with its head where its tail should be! Of course, it’s a horse standing in its stall backward. What a letdown.
Found on AdFreak.
RSS Feed
