Totally non-spoilery review!

[trinityvixen]

I will now attempt to manage a non-spoilery review of The Dark Knight. In which I not only spoil nothing but that I neither give my opinion on the movie or anything in the movie or the people involved with the movie. No, I absolutely promise. Even ivy03 can't fault this for spoilers. And if she can, I think I give up because in order not to spoil, I'm not even talking about the movie at all.

Here it is. No spoilers. At all. My thoughts: The Dark Knight played out more or less exactly like what I had in my head for a fanfic that I started and never finished. Almost. This is very weird to me, seeing almost what I pictured happening in my story happen on the screen.

That is all.

I look forward to seeing it again with some folk. More, I look forward to seeing the trailer for Watchmen (I guess they dropped the "The") again because of a minor argument I had with bigscary about whether or not the trailer is indicative of the film's adherence to the graphic novel or else is proof that the film completely trashed the most fabulous story ever in favor of looks. Seeing The Dark Knight again might help me make sense of it. I think this is also true of seeing the Watchmen trailer again on the big screen.

Because a trailer is not the movie. (Funnily enough, nowhere more emphatically have I learned that lesson than in the case of 300, which was done by the same people who are doing Watchmen.) It might have something to say about the movie, but I feel trailers more tell a story about the audience and its expectation than about the film. We see a trailer for a "superhero movie," and we have certain expectations. (One liners! CGI! Romance! Explosions!) Certain films which have broken the mold (Iron Man, in its way; Nolan's Batman films) still present trailers that, more or less, sell movies as they've always been. Yet Iron Man skirted enough hairy issues at large in our world today to put a bit of tarnish on the fanboy polish of the flying armor. The Dark Knight is...well, impossible to describe what it has done.

So what happens when you start with a source material that was already subverting the superhero before screenwriters worked it into a movie? Does the trailer say what it seems to say or does it say more? How close are you paying attention? I will be watching it very closely.

Comments

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

The Dark Knight played out more or less exactly like what I had in my head for a fanfic that I started and never finished.

OMG you mean Batman made out with Daddy Adama? No wonder it's breaking records!



BTW, any plans by anyone for a second expedition to The Dark Knight? I wanna go ;(

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I've been invited along with another group of friends, but, no, I've not made any myself. Sorry, dude.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

You could tell anything about Watchmen from that trailer? After seeing it I said to Wyeth, "That looked like random clips from 30 completely unrelated movies." I admit I don't know anything about the graphic novel, but I never read Hellboy, either (and hadn't seen the first movie yet) and the HB2 trailers were immediately appealing.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible that the clips were supposed to be unrelated since the graphic novel tells layering stories from the two groups of superheroes as well as background stories about certain characters. Having read the graphic novel, I could make out more of the story from the images just fine, but, no, they don't necessarily "tell a story." I think they picked high-impact images which bigscary objected to based on his reading of the novel. Essentially, he believes the point of the novel is that the supers aren't really super, and making them look super in a trailer is either deceptive or else indicative of the filmmakers missing the point of the novel.

I want to see it again to see if I can really make out which it is. All that I've read about the guy directing it indicates a very strong sense of his understanding the source material very, very well. And, like I said, the trailer isn't necessarily indicative of anything. It's not even a trailer. It's a teaser trailer which isn't supposed to do much more than tantalize. (Notably, there is only one line of dialogue spoken, so silence is another way to hide or obfuscate the object of the film.)

Honestly, I look forward to seeing it on the big screen, period. Analyzing it is just a bonus!

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I think your observation about trailers saying more about their intended audiences than about the movies is spot-on. It applies to (well, everything generally...) the way that movies are advertised generally, though -- basically you can tell exactly the age of the target audience for an ad for Mamma Mia based on whether Meryl Streep or Amanda Seyfried gets more air time. (Presumably the movie's the same regardless!)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Trailers have evolved as films have, as information dissemination has. They have to get out earlier and earlier. (It's ridiculous: Terminator Salvation hasn't been filming more than a month, and they had a teaser trailer for it already.) So that's how we get the "teaser" before the "real" (theatrical) trailer. It's kinda like how you have to send out save-the-date cards before you send out invitations. People get booked!

And to convince people to hold a space open for you in March 2009, you put out a teaser trailer with enough to interest (or confuse, since that might make the audience look into the matter more) the newbies and the knowledgeable. It's not supposed to communicate anything. It's just supposed to generate anticipatory hunger for the final product.

When the 2-and-a-half minute "real" trailer comes out, we'll be able to tell more about the story, the direction the adaptation is going. (Using clues not unlike what you pointed out about Mamma Mia!.)

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the graphic novel, so alls I got from the trailer was "There's this God-Man guy who can build stuff and make stuff float, and people like cops more than him."

...I suspect I'm not the target audience.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Actually, you're talking about Doc Manhattan, the big blue guy, right? Well, you'd generally be right in your assessment. Doc Manhattan is the only "super"hero in the graphic novel to have any powers and his powers are godlike. Because of him, we win the war in Vietnam and are constantly at nuclear threat level 60 billion. It comes back to the theory that we leaked nuclear technology to the Russians so that assured mutual destruction would actually keep the Cold War permanently cold. And it did. Doc Manhattan, being the only one like him, upsets that balance in the book, and things get really hairy.

You should really read the graphic novel. It's brilliant. Alan Moore I can take or leave (I often find him pretentious), but he gives damned good story in The Watchmen. I'll loan it to you if moonlightalice doesn't already have it.

[moonlightalice.livejournal.com]

I was so unimpressed by the Watchman trailer. It looked like the CGI had been painted in ala Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

...really? I was really impressed with Doctor Manhattan, actually. I like that they used his vaporization and recorporealization front-and-center to present the fact that the "heroes"...weren't.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

For an example, compare the Spirit trailer, which is by the same crew of people; it's equally disjointed and weird, but convinces me that the creators "got" The Spirit.

[avram]

See, I've got the exact opposite reactions in both cases. The trailer for The Spirit could've been for Frank Miller's Daredevil or Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. There was nothing specific to The Spirit or Will Eisner in it.

The Watchmen trailer, on the other hand, consisted entirely of scenes that were identifiably from the comic. Even the shot of Silk Spectre tumbling through the burning roof, even though that exact scene isn't in the book, we know what part of the story it's from.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Watchmen: comic to trailer comparison. (http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/article/watchmen_trailer_to_comic_comparison/)

I didn't get the trailer I saw for The Spirit. I felt that if you knew the material, the Watchmen trailer made tons of sense.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I loved The Spirit trailers, both of them. And the Watchmen trailer. Wooooooooo!

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree with Avram. Everything in the Watchmen trailer was clearly from the comic book. (I could tell even though I haven't read it in ages.) The Spirit trailer was pretty, but ... there was nothing that reminded me of Eisner's character beyond his mask and red tie.

Admittedly I'm not sure how any movie could really capture what was great about The Spirit. It would have to be more like The Twilight Zone movie, with the character popping in and out of other people's weirdo stories.