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“Spider-Man: Far From Home” Trailer!

The Avengers: Endgame spoiler ban imposed by directors Joe and Anthony Russo lifted today with this trailer for the next installment in the Spider-man franchise, but it’s your choice whether you want to read on. Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame lie ahead!

You’ve been warned.

Spider-man: Far From Home looks like it will pick up right where Endgame left off, with Peter Parker returning to school and trying to rebuild his life after having been snapped out of existence for five years. Needless to say, it won’t be easy. The new Far From Home trailer unveils some huge new concepts that are clearly to impact Phase 4 of the MCU – just as the first Avengers movie introduced us to Thanos and Infinity Stones, Spider-man is paving the way for a Marvel Multiverse.

In other words, anything can happen, from this point on. The Multiverse is a mind-boggling concept that, in hindsight, seems to have been set up in Endgame: there, in order to defeat Thanos, the Avengers were forced to travel back in time and open up branch-realities – realities in which Loki escaped with the Tesseract during the Battle of New York, or Gamora never met the Guardians of the Galaxy, for instance. At the end of Endgame, Captain America was sent back in time to shut down these alternate realities and prevent them from impacting our timeline – but it seems he might have missed a few.

Something big is happening in Far From Home. Elemental demons, seemingly a product of all this reality-bending, time-traveling stuff, are attacking the earth, coming through a “hole in our dimension” as Nick Fury calls it – and the only thing that stands in their way is Spider-man, who will now probably have to do some reality-bending of his own to stop them. The Multiverse has apparently been opened, which means we could see all sorts of weird things from now on: alternate versions of characters, for instance. I doubt that Spidey will be able to stop this, and I also doubt he’ll want to. Throughout the trailer, we see him mourning the death of his mentor and father-figure, Tony Stark (told you this contained spoilers). The Multiverse could easily bring back Tony, or an alternate version of Tony: in fact, the Multiverse makes any number of things possible. That Black Widow movie that’s coming up, even though Black Widow is currently dead? Well, maybe this is alternate Black Widow. The Scarlet Witch streaming show that will be set in the 1950’s, before Scarlet Witch was born? Time travel shenanigans and pocket-dimensions could explain that too.

The Multiverse can make pretty much anything – and everything – a reality. The MCU just got a whole lot bigger, and a whole lot more complicated.

So let’s bring our focus back down to earth: obviously, this trailer is going to be talked about in the coming days and weeks for the Multiverse reveal, but there’s a lot of other stuff happening here that’s also worth mentioning. Nick Fury and Maria Hill are back, as we expected, and Fury has recruited Peter Parker for this mission because apparently every other superhero is currently occupied (that seems…implausible, to say the least, but we’ll roll with it). Another big surprise is seeing Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Mysterio working for Fury – in fact, he seems to be the head of this operation to shut down the Multiverse: which seems a little dangerous, since Mysterio is a Spider-man villain in the comics.

Peter himself is still cheerful and innocent, and seems a little nervous about going into the Multiverse, following in the footsteps of Miles Morales in last year’s animated (and completely unrelated) Spider-man: Into The Spider-Verse. He wears a variety of cool new outfits, but he is obviously still adjusting to his new role as one of Earth’s mightiest heroes – he stills thinks of himself as the friendly neighborhood Spider-man. He has some romantic tension with MJ, but he’s being removed from his friends, pulled away from them by his duties even as he tries to enjoy a European vacation.

The real star here is clearly supposed to be Mysterio, who is shown wearing his iconic fish-bowl helmet and using magic. But there’s another character whose absence is already like a gaping hole in the dimension, and that’s Tony Stark. There’s graffiti of him on walls, and shrines dedicated to him in street-corners: while bringing Tony back might be cheating, it’s at least a possibility now with the introduction of the Multiverse.

Trailer Rating: 8/10

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“Ophelia” Trailer!

The stories of Shakespeare have been redundantly adapted to the big screen over and over again, but every now and again there comes a fresh look at the classic stories that truly turns the tables and gives modern audiences a new taste for the Bard and his work.

Ophelia, an interesting new spin on the old Hamlet story, looks like it could be one such game-changer. Here, the camera has been turned on one of the play’s supporting characters: the princess Ophelia, who is usually only remembered these days for her iconic death by drowning. This is a chance to bring an overlooked heroine into the spotlight, and Ophelia seems to be giving the princess a more active role, while also highlighting the role of Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude. Daisy Ridley of Star Wars will take on the role of Ophelia, while Gertrude will be portrayed by Naomi Watts. Tom Felton, best known as Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter series, will play Ophelia’s devoted brother Laertes. That sort of star power can’t be ignored.

Without stepping too far into the fantastical, Ophelia looks to be bringing the story to life in a fresh and exciting way: with wars, political intrigue, romance and tragedy cleverly viewed from a woman’s eyes – not just in front of the camera, but behind it too, as the film is directed by Australian filmmaker Claire McCarthy. Too many adaptations of these medieval stories try to give them a modern spin (such as last year’s mega-flop Robin Hood, which tried to turn the hero of English folklore into a literal superhero). Ophelia, on the other hand, has a definite antiquated atmosphere, from the poetic dialogue to the beautiful vistas of Danish landscapes – well, technically, Czech Republic landscapes, but whatever. Some quite picturesque castles, at any rate.

Trailer Rating: 7/10

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“Sonic The Hedgehog” Trailer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvvZaBf9QQI

There’s a serious problem with video games being turned into movies. Has anyone noticed that they never work? Yet for some reason these adaptations keep being made, despite the fact that games simply aren’t suited for this type of medium.

You see, video games are interactive entertainment, whereas movies are not. Movies are about stories, and video games (for the most part) are not. So when a video game gets turned into a movie, you lose the interactive element, the part that makes the game entertaining, and you gain hours worth of new story: the boring part. Very few people play a game for the story – especially with something like Sonic the Hedgehog, which has a simple “plot”, if it can even be called that, and instead focuses (as it should) on running around different themed levels and collecting points. The layout of a game, however, does not and cannot work for a movie – so instead of challenging themselves, the filmmakers decide to simply throw out everything that made the game special to fans, except for a few sound effects and minuscule hints, while focusing their attention on crafting a generic story that can be called Sonic the Hedgehog if it loosely employs some of the game’s characters and logo.

It doesn’t work like that, though, and they know it. Trying to give Sonic a new plot so that it can appeal to mainstream audiences is a faulty strategy – it’s an affront to the fans, and it’s unlikely to capture much attention from the general public considering that another movie featuring a human teaming up with a feisty animal sidekick is already about to hit theaters – that being Detective Pikachu, which actually knows how to make the inaccessibly deep Pokemon mythology easy for audiences to understand and enjoy, at least based on the overwhelmingly positive reactions to that movie’s trailers. Meanwhile Sonic finds itself in an unenviable position where its official trailer has, as of this writing, 47 thousand likes on YouTube – and 47 thousand dislikes.

There’s really not that much to say about the trailer itself, because it looks even more one-dimensional than the original game. Sonic the Hedgehog somehow ends up in the modern world (because, why not?), and teams up with James Marsden to defeat Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey, how low you’ve sunk). Sonic looks and sounds like a cheap knock-off Pikachu – but much less adorable, much less unique, and much less relateable. In an attempt to make the 1990’s Sega game accessible to modern audiences, Paramount has committed a huge mistake.

And so we’re left wondering how this video-game/movie chimera could have been avoided, if the film had hearkened back to its roots as a somewhat cheesy and simplistic game that didn’t take itself too seriously: they could have even used old-fashioned pixelated special effects to capture that style, or sent James Marsden into a Sega console so we could see him work his way out through the game. But, seriously, changing the Paramount stars to gold rings is the best they can do?

Trailer Rating: 4/10

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“Gemini Man” Trailer!

The innovative mind of Ang Lee brings us an original sci-fi action thriller, the premise of which has literally been done by hundreds, if not thousands, of previous sci-fi action thrillers – that’s right, clones. So unique. But, you see, this time it’s Will Smith getting cloned, so there you have it: completely original story.

Granted, Gemini Man has been in development since 1997, so it can hardly be blamed if many other stories have come and gone before it reaches the big screen in October. And it does star Will Smith, which is a draw: in fact, it stars Will Smith in two roles – as the aging assassin Henry Brogen, and the de-aged clone of himself that is hunting him. De-aging techniques have come so far, they’re incredible. The question of why Brogen has been cloned, and how, is presumably one of the film’s plot points, but let’s just say the vague explanation given in the trailer is insufferably bad:

“You made a person out of another person,” the clone says with disbelief. “Then you sent me to kill him.”

And, of course, it features all the typical elements of generic spy films: Random Exploding Car? Check. Government Organization With Something To Hide? Check. Glowing Metallic Title Font? Check.

Maybe there’s a decent movie behind all the incredibly overdone action-thriller tropes that this trailer has put forward, but I’m firmly convinced that Gemini Man is relying way too heavily on the fact that it’s got Will Smith starring in not one, but two lead roles. Action-thrillers have become more and more boringly unoriginal as more and more studios try to unseat the Mission: Impossible films – and I’m predicting that Gemini Man, like its premise, will be just another clone.

Trailer Rating: 5/10