In My Opinion: Trailers
In a week when we’ve seen the release of some of the biggest trailers of the year Joe West reflects on The Hobbit, The Dark Knight Rises and trailers in general…
I started reading The Hobbit, by Jesus Robert Rodriguez Tolkien, when I was about 10. I was on a ferry to France with my parents ahead of an Orangina-fuelled Eurocamp holiday during which my brother and I would attempt to meet children from as many different nations as possible to learn their domestic swearwords and eat their puréed fruit snacks.
The book was recommended to me by a teacher who, on reflection, was probably not a fan of Tolkien in particular but recognised innate nerdiness in me and sought to fuel it with a papery lozenge of complex fantasy. Sadly I can’t say that I enjoyed the experience and I never felt compelled to read the Lord of The Rings trilogy afterwards.
The release of a trailer for Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the book landed this week and my immediate thought was ‘I’m never going to be able to remember all of those fucking dwarves’. I was also a little sceptical about Martin Freeman’s ability to play Bilbo with any gravitas, because he acted himself into a corner a decade ago as Tim in The Office and has since been unable to escape roles as the straight-man in farcical comedies. I imagine that at points throughout the film he’ll look directly into the camera and sigh through his nose. Then hide Gandalf’s stapler.
Whatever you think about the first trailer for The Hobbit, the fact that it has been released almost a year before the actual film it is promoting speaks volumes. That the hype juggernaut is building pace already means we are in for 12 more months of drip fed information and trailers which explore the plot to a degree that could render the actual film irrelevant. It also gives people a year to form an unshakable opinion about the quality of The Hobbit without having to do anything as crass as actually watch it.
Another major trailer launch occurred in the last few days, with Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy-swansong The Dark Knight Rises appearing in carefully coddled form just 7 months prior to its release, which by The Hobbit’s standards may as well be next week. Trailers always raise debate and sometimes cause controversy, but never have I head of one which results in changes being made to the actual film*. That’s why I was as astonished as I hope many of you were to read that people are complaining about the voice of central villain Bane. To some ears the two or three sentences spoken by the character in the trailer were apparently unintelligible.
This quickly became such a problem that Nolan has been urged by the studio to make some changes to the voice of a man who is speaking through a bloody MASK. But are these plaintiffs must be forgetting about the guttural curds hawked up through the vocal ligaments of Christian Bale which are supposed to pass for words in the previous two movies.
If filmmakers are going to start pandering to the previously impotent braying of YouTube comment donkeys then every movie will end up being called ‘Nyan Cats on a Plane’ or ‘Rebecca Black to the Future’. There’s nothing wrong with design by committee. But when that committee is made up of 15 year olds flinging digital shit at your window, then it’s probably best to let Tom Hardy speak however he likes.
*I say that having done not a jot of research. It could happen all the time.
