The Trailer Hypothesis

Like movies, there are good and bad trailers. Basically, the goal of a trailer is to make you want to fork out your money to see the movie when it comes out in the future. Unfortunately, they are often so badly made that they tend to make me scurry for cover instead.

Trailers can pretty much be classified into several categories.

The Good - basically well-made and cool trailers, with good music. Intelligence is a wonderful bonus. A good example would be Trailer 3 for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Hilarious, self-deprecating and very, very smart, it's probably the best trailer I've ever seen.

The Bad - the vast majority of trailers out there. Boring, lazily-made crap that's pretty much just a waste of time. Usually full of boring action cliches or unfunny infantile jokes. And then there are those that turn you off the movie entirely. Case in point, the House of Wax trailer makes the movie look completely stupid. If a town is not on the GPRS, you get the fuck out of there. If a museum is made entirely out of wax, you don't go in there. If a wax statue looks creepily lifelike and starts moving, you pretty much run like blazes. Why that moronic group stays is completely beyond me. Perhaps they're fratboys and sorority girls. The fact that Paris Hilton is one of them actually brings credibility to the plot.

The above two categories are pretty safe though, because what you see is pretty much what you get. If the trailer looks good, the movie is probably going to be good. If it looks shitty, a shitty movie is probably what you'll find if you stupidly pay for it. And if it looks absolutely ridiculously bad, like House of Wax, the movie will be dumb too.

There's one more category:

The Ugly - Evil trailers. They're nasty, sneaky, deceptive little products of canny editing. These are the trailers that make the movie look much better than it really is. You get sucked into the trailer, and when you go to the movie, you realize it's crap, and that you've just been conned. All you can do is shake your fist impotently at the producers who're laughing all the way to the bank.

Examples of these trailers include those for I Am Sam, Scary Movie and Pearl Harbor.

For I Am Sam, the trailer had the best moments, and the rhythm of the trailer was paced such that you really felt for the characters. In fact, I almost cried when I saw it for the first time. When I actually saw the movie, I almost cried too, but out of frustration. The powerful moments that had worked so well when juxtaposed against each other in the trailer lost all their potency when dissipated throughout the movie, and it was disheartening to realize the characters were all one-dimensional.

The Scary Movie trailer was funny as hell. Unfortunately all the best jokes were in it. Pearl Harbor's trailer had a great sequence of Japanese zero planes flying over defenceless civilians like a kid playing baseball and a housewife hanging her laundry. Too bad the movie was a lame love story. I still laugh out loud at the sex scene among the parachutes.

Unfortunately, there's no sure way to differentiate between a Good Trailer and an Ugly Trailer. Well, I admit, the presence of Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer on Pearl Harbor should've been a dead giveaway. But often things aren't so evident. You just have to cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Good luck at the movies.