Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest installment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
Mege: I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that the number of incompetent politicians is rising. Or maybe corona brings their weakness into stronger relief. Either way, we need a revolution. That can be hard to bring about – just ask the good people of the Wasp Network, who wanted to subvert Castro’s Cuba in the 1990ies. Penélope Cruz, Wagner Moura, Edgar Ramírez, Ana de Armas, Gael García Bernal – all in one movie. It’s already on Netflix. Venceremos and all that.
Eric: Another service, another flagship dystopian show. Brave New World is, of course, one of the older fictions in this by now not-at-all-niche genre. Yet much of its relevance is perhaps not lost upon us, in this the age of immediate gratification. While 1984 explored one end of the spectrum of social control through punishment, Brave New World explores the other through a seeming utopia – what if we could accept being slaves to our impulses and let a system do our thinking for us? If that sounds familiar, you might not be the only one twigging on to how Huxley may have been more visionary than we imagined, and not just in his prediction of systems of emotional conditioning: as disturbing as its hermetically sealed and rigidly hierarchical world is, it’s the sense of pleasant innocuousness that inspires the most dread.
Matt: You say it best when you say nothing at all: this is the kind of trailer – and, more likely than not, the kind of film – that looks gorgeous, but none of those looks matter a jot the moment it opens its mouth. Perhaps it’s better in the Russian original, but I doubt it. Obviously the visuals too aren’t entirely original: we’ve seen this sort of thing in Inception and Doctor Strange, but it’s still pretty damn cool to see it done well. But yeah, the characters and dialogues seem especially dire in this one, and once they introduce the monstrous baddies from the coma dimension all the visual flair is gone. I have to admit that I’m especially disappointed because I thought it might be an adaptation of Alex Garland’s novel The Coma, which could be turned into a nifty little film by a visually inventive director who trusts the material.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 