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“No Time To Die” Trailer Review!

Yesterday, Marvel Studios had to abruptly shift the release for their first Black Widow trailer to the middle of the night so as to give themselves ample room to break the internet before the hotly-anticipated first trailer for No Time To Die dropped. And now we can see why. The trailer for Daniel Craig’s final James Bond movie is finally here, and it looks like the sort of film that Black Widow, with its similar spy-thriller vibes, will probably want to keep at arm’s length. But considering that both films are going to be released within the span of a few weeks, they will eventually come head-to-head, and it will be very interesting to see which one comes out on top.

No Time To Die has the advantage of being the latest installment in a well-established franchise, and fans are going to want to see Daniel Craig in the role of James Bond, since he’s made it very clear this is his last time playing the character. Fittingly, the plot of this movie revolves around Craig’s Bond coming out of retirement in Jamaica and being roped into a nefarious conspiracy. But along the way, he will end up passing the torch (sort of) to a new agent 007, this one a young black woman played by the extraordinary Lashana Lynch. Lynch’s character, named Nomi, may be new to the franchise, but she’s already charismatic and captivating in this first trailer, telling the middle-aged Bond to stay in his lane unless he wants her to put a bullet in his knee – “the one that works,” she adds. With her glamour and winning personality (and Phoebe Waller-Bridge writing all of this film’s female characters), Lynch is almost guaranteed to be one of the best things about this new Bond movie, and hopefully she’ll get to stay in the franchise for some time.

As for Rami Malek, his performance as the villain Safin is probably going to be hindered by the ghostly Phantom Of The Opera mask his character is wearing throughout most of the trailer. Hopefully the Oscar-winning actor has something more to do than just deliver villain speeches. Not that he won’t knock those villain speeches out of the park, but still, this is a Bond movie – give him something to do!

All in all, the film looks good: I do want to see more action, however, as most of what we see in the trailer consists of the standard building-blocks of any spy-movie trailer: cars careening over cliff roads? Check. Bicycle chase through a seaside village in Italy? Check. There are a couple of things that Bond has that other spies don’t, however – specifically, an Aston Martin with machine guns in the headlights. Stylish.

So what do you think? Share your own thoughts, theories and opinions in the comments below!

Trailer Rating: 8.5/10

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“Gemini Man” Second Trailer!

Nobody’s changed the boring sci-fi logo for this film, which is a real shame – but at least this time around they’ve made it glow, so that’s something. Seriously, I give them three months to swap that logo out for something even remotely interesting, and they give me the exact same thing but in neon blue?

As for the trailer itself, its content has gotten more convoluted than last time, but at least they’ve extracted some of the cringey dialogue like “You made a person out of another person”. But just wait; I’m sure that memorable line is still somewhere in the movie itself, they’ll just trick you into thinking they’ve changed so they can get you into the theater. Who would do such a thing?, you might ask. David Benioff, I might answer in this hypothetical scenario. Benioff, one of the two Game of Thrones screenwriters now literally synonymous with “bad writers” in Google’s database,  is undoubtedly going through a hard time – but that honestly doesn’t excuse the fact that he apparently wrote this film: and besides, he’s getting a job with Disney writing a Star Wars trilogy, so I’m sure he’ll be fine.

Will Smith still seems to be trying really hard to sell this story about an assassin trying to rescue his young clone from a life of brainwashing and manipulation: granted, Gemini Man is able to get to that premise before the upcoming Marvel film Black Widow, which looks like it might include that element as well. But take a wild guess which one will succeed. Anyway, one problem with the trailer is that Will Smith – obviously – plays both himself and his younger-looking clone, and it’s very difficult to figure out when he’s talking or his clone is; leaving aside the fact that they look similar enough that it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart. And to top it off, Will Smith is the film’s only selling point, so he has to be the brunt of really bad title-card puns, like “Who WILL Save You?”

One thing this trailer improves is its action: apparently you can do quite a lot with a bicycle – though said bicycle scene seems to be the film’s crown jewel of action scenes so far, which makes me a little nervous. We’ve got a fight in a hardware store with young Will Smith riding a tank into battle – I think it’s young Will Smith, could be the random dude in the suit who shows up occasionally to look evil, though. There’s one cool sequence where our Will Smith throws a grenade at young Will Smith, only to have young Will Smith hit it with a bullet in mid-air and send it ricocheting back. Honestly, I’m having a very hard time finding anything interesting here at all. And having Will Smith (our Will Smith, not young Will Smith) tell the other Will Smith ominously at the end of the trailer that “This has to be stopped, because what if somebody knew what we really are?” – well, that doesn’t cut it either. Because I don’t frankly care what they really are: they’re Will Smith and a CGI construct of Will Smith – the trailers haven’t given me any reason to want to see what happens to them, or what secrets about their past might be uncovered.

Trailer Rating: 4/10