The Movie Evangelist

Half Dozen Special: The 6 Best Superbowl Trailers

Posted on February 7, 2011 Updated on February 7, 2011

I love pretty much anything to do with sport. I’m an avid fan of football, rugby, cricket, snooker, darts, tiddlywinks, sloth racing, synchronised bog snorkelling, you name it, I’ll watch it. With one exception. Try as I might, and believe me I’ve tried over the years, I’ve never been able to get into American Football. I don’t know what it is; I used to think it was the gaps in play, where a match which is supposed to last 60 minutes takes upwards of three hours normally, but that’s never stopped me liking baseball, for example. There’s certainly plenty of strategy involved, and it has a lot of the qualities that other sports I love have, but for some reason, American Football and I are always destined to tread different paths.

But there is one upside to the giant rock concert that had a small sporting event during the intervals last night, and that’s the commercials. With most of America watching who’ll be crowned World Champion of America, advertising rates are at a premium, so the film studios stump up their biggest wads of cash for the year to try to entice viewers into cinemas later in the year. And as a typical slot lasts only thirty seconds, it’s not only ideal for the cripplingly short attention spans of most viewers, but also means that most are packed wall to wall with keen quips, giant explosions and things doing things to other things in the biggest way possible. With explosions and quips. And explosions! BOOM!

So this isn’t high art, it’s a three minute mainlined shot of adrenaline designed to get you pumped for a summer of popcorn and flashing light shows that will make parts of your brain melt if stared at too long. There were a few movies that decided that such shenanigans were beneath them, so no Harry Potter 7b or Cars 2 or Green Lantern or, most disappointingly, X-Men: First Class. But there were enough things here going crash, boom and kapow to keep most happy.

Super 8

So this is the one that’s gained most attention, given that we knew very little about it before, and now we know that it looks a bit like E.T. and a bit like Cloverfield and a bit like a few other things that we’ve seen before, but we should all be not very surprised impressed given that it’s from the powerhouse pairing of Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams. It doesn’t have the immediate impact of a giant famous statue head skidding down the street, but expect geeks to be poring over it, frame by frame, for weeks to come.

Captain America: The First Avenger

We’ve already had one trailer for Captain America; it was called Iron Man 2. A disappointing movie in most respects, it did a lot to set up the future films in the Avengers series, and this summer we get two more. Thor also had a trailer, but largely footage we’d seen in earlier trailers, so this was the first actual footage we’ve been witness to. Scrawny Chris Evans is one of the more impressive effects seen this year, although buff Chris Evans looks just a tad scary. Anyways, as long as they don’t forget some plot this time, and to make it work as an actual self-contained movie rather than just another giant trailer for The Avengers, then we should be fine.

Cowboys and Aliens

Lots more new footage in this trailer. What we do see: there’s cowboys. There’s aliens. The cowboys are fighting the aliens. What we don’t see: whether James Bond can do an American accent in a way that’s at least not distracting. We also don’t see Sam Rockwell or Paul Dano, both of whom should hopefully do enough character acting to make this interesting in between all the necessary fighty bits.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Double length this one, to allow for even more quips, explodings, women with tails, that bloke off of Lovejoy being all piratey, people swinging on chandeliers and even more explosions. Ian McShane looks to be successfully channelling a Geoffrey-Rush-in-the-first-one vibe, which is a good thing, and as Geoffrey Rush is back in this one again, quippage should be cranked up to maximum levels. Be warned Disney: despite sitting through all 169 minutes of the will-sapping tedium that was POTC: At World’s End, I still have some good will left for this one. Fail to make it like the original this time, though, and that will probably be me done with this series.

Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

Now if anything tested my good will towards a franchise, it is the eyeball abusing monstrosity that was Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. Transformers were my favourite childhood toy outside of Lego, and the first movie was an acceptable attempt at this live action franchise; the second was so bad it made me want to invent time travel so I could go back and warn everyone involved what they were about to do. Crucially, it looks as if you can actually make out what’s going on in this trailer, which wasn’t the case at almost any point in the entire running time of the last one. That could be the determining factor in working out whether this is at least bearable.

Rango

And one last one. There’s plenty that didn’t make my six that still look as if they could be enjoyable, but for my last trailer of this selection I just had to include this animated Johnny Depp offering. Mainly because it has the Superbowl trailer checklist, and it’s working through it step. By. Step. (Yes, that’s right, MORE EXPLOSIONS.)