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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

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So…A “Hunger Games” Prequel Is Happening…

Ever since the Hunger Games franchise left theaters back in 2015, Lionsgate Studios has been trying to find a replacement for what was, along with the Twilight Saga, their largest film property: their top three highest-grossing movies are still The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, and The Hunger Games. Sadly, the studio has not had much luck doing that: stand-alone films such as Robin Hood (remember that? No?) flopped, and the Divergent series fizzled out. John Wick has recently begun to fill the role that Hunger Games once held, thanks to the sudden frenzy of interest surrounding star Keanu Reeves, but now it looks like Lionsgate doesn’t need to move on from its young-adult dystopian thriller roots at all.

That’s right: today, accompanying news that Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins will be releasing a prequel to her best-selling book series in May 2020, Lionsgate Studios wasted no time announcing that they are communicating with Collins  about “the movie”. Apparently there’s not even any doubt or hesitation about this project – there will be a movie prequel to The Hunger Games, whether you want it or not.

Don’t expect Jennifer Lawrence to be reprising the role of Katniss, however, and don’t expect many (or possibly any) familiar faces. The prequel novel will be set 64 years before the first book in the original trilogy, and will probably explore the origins or early days of the Games themselves, in a time when the world of Panem was still recovering from the scars of war; what Collins calls “the Dark Days”. Setting it so long ago in her world’s past will presumably give the prequel some freedom to breathe: traditionally, with prequels, they’re set in the time period directly before their successors, so that they can include hundreds of unnecessary cameos from, for instance, the parents of our original protagonists, or the backstories of recognizable antagonists. This is almost always a bad idea: rather than selling us on the premise of the novel that we’re currently reading, these types of prequels instead get bogged down while trying to remind us that we’re actually not getting the full story – to understand that, you’d have to stop by your local Barnes & Noble and pick up an expensive hardcover copy of the book you should be reading.

This, of course, extends to movies as well: Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy fell into this trap, by wasting time on tie-ins and unsubtle nods to his original Lord of the Rings trilogy (for instance, making The Hobbit into a trilogy to begin with, and then throwing in Legolas, and trying to make the characters at his disposal into carbon-copies of existing ones from Lord of the Rings).

Now, simply setting it 64 years in the past doesn’t necessarily mean the Hunger Games prequel won’t do the same thing: The Hobbit was set 60 years before the Lord of the Rings (though, that particular story also deals with extremely long-lived and in some cases immortal characters, so I’ll let that slide). J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts prequels to the modern world of Harry Potter, however, while great movies (yeah, I said it), are set in the 1920s and still manage to include an inordinate amount of inexplicable cameos from characters who really shouldn’t be alive yet in her timeline, most notably Professor McGonagall. Let’s not even get started on that, though.

Anyway, we will be getting both a novel and a movie set long before Hunger Games, and presumably Lionsgate will try to turn this into a huge franchise, just as it was back in 2013, when Catching Fire grossed 865 million dollars worldwide and became the 18th highest-grossing movie of all time in North America. Will they be able to do it? More importantly, will they be able to do it and also make a good movie in the process? They have it in them: all four of the movies in the franchise received Fresh ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, with the first two even reaching Certified Fresh status. Setting the prequel long before the events of the original trilogy also helps, since we can assume (for now) that it will have its own distinct atmosphere and story, rather than leaning too heavily on the books that came before.

Let the Games begin.

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“Ad Astra” Trailer Review!

It’s been difficult for any sci-fi films to compete with the indomitable force that is Star Wars over the last couple of years, and so we’ve seen the genre descend into something of a niche – sci-fi and space-adventure films like Gravity and Interstellar still win awards and get critical praise, but tend to fall short at the box-office. Sci-fi adaptations have been few and far between: even Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which should be an easy win for any studio, has been stuck in stasis over at Apple TV.

This year, 20th Century FOX (now owned by Disney) is going to be attempting the impossible, with a new, completely-original sci-fi epic that transforms award-bait Brad Pitt into an astronaut living in the shadow of his father, who was lost in the deep expanses of space. He’s got all the trademarks of one of your generic astronaut protagonist of the last few years – maybe it’s just the astronaut suit and the sort of vaguely Midwestern name, but our hero Roy McBride feels like an amalgamation of many stellar explorers who have come before.

The first part of the new Ad Astra trailer only seems to reinforce this: Liv Tyler gets the thankless job of playing Roy’s wife – again, one of the archetypal characters in modern astronaut thrillers. After meeting her, we’re then treated to some fairly generic explosions on the International Space Station that send Roy plummeting towards the surface of the Earth (I honestly have no clue how he makes it out of that alive). As he wakes up in a hospital bed, I’m already yawning and waiting for this to turn into a sequel to Gravity.

Yeah, no.

Immediately after that point, the trailer changes radically – Tyler’s character is going on about fires and explosions all over the world, Pitt discovers that his father is alive somewhere on the far side of the solar system, working on alien tech that could destroy the earth, and there’s…a car-chase on the Moon? The way this trailer plays on your subdued expectations, and makes you think you’re watching another sad, ponderous astronaut drama: and then suddenly throws you into a full-speed-ahead science-fiction epic? That’s brilliant. It’s like the best of both worlds – because don’t get me wrong, the trailer still unabashedly shows off how much Ad Astra wants praise (and awards) from critics; aside from Pitt and Tyler, the film also stars Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones and rising star Ruth Negga (who, unfortunately, is not seen in the trailer).

And yes, there is one epic action-scene on the Moon, with astronauts in little space-buggies zipping around shooting at each other – you honestly can’t go wrong with something like that.

Trailer Rating: 8.5/10

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Star Wars Episode IX Teaser Trailer!

This is going to be something of an unusual review. I will admit why right up front.

The truth is, I haven’t watched the last few Star Wars movies. The original trilogy? The prequels? I’ve watched those, multiple times. But this new saga had never appealed to me until now, when, suddenly, I find myself standing dazed and confused wondering what on earth, or what on Tattooine, this trailer means. And that is very unfortunate, because this trailer looks pretty awesome, even though a good bit of its symbolism is probably lost on me.

We’ll discuss the big stuff first though, just because this is the stuff I do understand pretty much entirely. SPOILERS AHEAD, for those of you, who, like me, had never watched the last two Star Wars movies.

1: The Title. The film’s long-anticipated title has been revealed to be Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, which is very cool – “Every Generation Has A Legend” is the movie’s slogan. I am aware that Luke Skywalker is dead, and I have no clue whether this title is supposed to refer to him returning, or something like that. We hear Luke’s voice in the first part of the trailer, as he tells Rey about her inner power, and how a thousand generations live within her.

2: Princess Leia! The late great Carrie Fisher is in the movie, as expected, and gets a beautiful and heart-warming moment in the trailer, tearfully embracing Rey (Daisy Ridley). Having not watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens or Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I can’t give any opinion on Rey herself, except that she looks like an incredible heroine: there’s a moment here, at the 1:08 mark, where she backflips onto a very fast moving spaceship that seems to be trying to mow her down. It’s a great shot.

3: THE EMPEROR IS BACK? I didn’t even realize what I was seeing, at the 1:39 mark, when we see Rey and her team looking out over a wide barren landscape, gazing towards some distant mass of broken metal: I probably should have realized immediately that this is the remains of the literal Death Star – and, at the very end of the trailer, we hear the ominous laughter of Emperor Palpatine: who I, at least, thought was dead. Was this common knowledge to people, that the Emperor is back? That the Death Star is still out there, somewhere in the universe? Though, to be fair, the Death Star looks pretty dead and lifeless at this point, but it looked only half-built in The Return of the Jedi and turned out to be fully functional, so I don’t trust that megalithic weapon, however broken it might look. There’s something really scary about the Death Star, honestly, that makes its appearance here really awe-inspiring.

Those are most of the big things, I think, that this trailer shows. One surprising reveal, at least for me, was the appearance of Billy Dee Williams reprising his role as Lando from the original trilogy. We see characters like Chewbacca and C-3P0 again, though, of course, there’s also appearances from the newer generation, such as Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), Poe (Oscar Isaac), and Finn (John Boyega). The backstories of these new characters are a total mystery to me, and I’m eager to fill this gap in my knowledge, because they all look pretty interesting. The droid BB-8, I could do without: I’ve seen this character pretty much everywhere for years now – like Olaf from Frozen, or Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, these “mascot” characters always become really annoying to me, really quickly.

The trailer looks really awesome, and there’s no way I’m gonna miss seeing this in theaters: this is the end of an incredible and beloved era. I used to love the Star Wars movies, but lost my enthusiasm for them – now, as the story comes to an end, my passion for this brilliant universe has been renewed. Maybe I’ll even get around to watching The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi sometime in between now and December, when The Rise of Skywalker will come out.

Trailer Rating: 9.5/10