The Big Game's 5 Biggest Trailers
My ranked list of the Super Bowl movie ads that grabbed my attention.
I get that this year it was hard for Super Bowl ads to compete with a great game (Go Rams!) and a legendary halftime show. But long after the nacho cheese has congealed and the wings have gone soggy, the movie trailers that dropped during the Big Game will remain on the Internet. Here are the ones that piqued my interest the most, ranked in descending order.
Jurassic Park Dominion (In theaters June 10.)
This movie is probably not going to be very good because the past few Jurassic Park reboots have been mediocre at best. (Though I can’t say that I wish they’d never been made because then we wouldn’t have gotten the brilliant parody of the franchise in Rick and Morty, “Anatomy Park.” I love how they make fun of the T-Rex randomly helping at the end of Jurassic World.) But I cannot resist the shameless nostalgia play of bringing back the cast from the original film. We see Sam Neil’s Alan Grant blush when he sees Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler again, and Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm is still hilariously lecturing us on how humanity doesn’t know what it’s doing. As a side note, I had a bit of cognitive dissonance with Laura Dean because her career in film and television has far exceeded the role she played in the original Jurassic Park. I’m not sure I can say the same of Sam Neil; he was still the guy from Jurassic Park here. Jeff Goldblum is just Jeff Goldblum, no matter what. And he should never have to apologize for that.
Nope (In theaters July 22.)
As much as I’d like to be, I’m not a big horror fan, but I did enjoy Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning Get Out because it uses the horror genre to generate social commentary (and it wasn’t too scary for me). I’m into the tone of this trailer. There’s a Quentin Tarantino/Once Upon in Hollywood vintage cool from the music cues, groovy dancing, and the remote desert ranch setting. That paired with Peele’s Hitchcockian sensibilities could be very fun. Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya returns to work with the director who arguably gave him his breakout role in Get Out. I’m also excited to see Keke Palmer and Academy Award nominee Steven Yeun here. Palmer gave a very powerful performance in Alice, a film that recently flopped at Sundance, so I’m glad that she gets the chance to star in a higher profile and potentially more critically acclaimed film here. And after Minari, Yeun is arguably at the top of his game right now.
Moon Knight (On Disney+ March 30.)
This one was technically not a trailer, but rather a “big game TV spot,” so please manage your expectations. I don’t think this shows us that much more than the official trailer we got last month, with the exception of getting a better view of Oscar Isaac in the full Moon Knight costume at the very end as he catches his crescent-shaped boomerang. This still ranks high on my list because I love Oscar Isaac, I love Marvel, and this trailer makes the show look like it will be an intense psychological thriller. Kudos to whoever edited this spot. So many quick cuts set to the rhythm of Kid Cudi’s “Day N Nite” give it a propulsive energy.
The Rings of Power (On Amazon Prime Video September 2.)
There’s a secret chamber in my heart reserved exclusively for Tolkien, and I think Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is one of the greatest achievements in novel to film adaptation. (I’m not including The Hobbit films here, mind you.) I am therefore trying to restrain anticipatory excitement as much as possible and remain skeptical of Amazon’s colossal series, which will take place thousands of years before we meet Frodo Baggins. Vanity Fair estimates that by the time Amazon finishes five seasons of the series, they will have spent over a billion dollars. And this trailer, while steeped in CGI, looks expensive. There’s not enough here to get a sense of how the story will stack up to its predecessors, but the general aesthetic and character designs featured are enough to get me excited. The only named character I’m aware of is Galadriel, who is comparatively very, very young in this series. I’m currently combing through Vanity Fair’s coverage to find out more. I have read The Silmarillion, which is basically Middle-Earth’s bible, and I’m a little worried that the series won’t be able to convert the epic poetry myth/folklore style narrative, which is a much tougher read than The Lord of the Rings, into a compelling character-focused serialized drama. But the shiny flashes of high fantasy here are enough to keep me interested.
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (In theaters May 6.)
I was already excited for Marvel’s next big tentpole film, especially since I think it will push the high concepts of the MCU’s Phase 4 forward in a big way. This trailer, more so than the last, seems to imply that the events of this film are a direct result of Doctor Strange’s attempt to help Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home, tampering with reality in an unhealthy way. It’s also densely packed with lots of other characters and locales that exceed the scope of that preceding film. Stephen Strange faces all kinds of weird and wacky Twilight Zone-esque horrors, he asks Wanda Maximoff/Scarlett Witch for help with the multiverse, what I think is the Kamar-Taj is under siege, what appears to be evil Doctor Strange from the What if…? animated series appears, and Strange must answer for his crimes against reality.
As if all that weren’t exciting enough, we hear PATRICK STEWART’s voice at Strange’s trial. We’ve been burned by actor cameos before (see Evan Peters in WandaVision), and critics seem to be a broken record in speculating if mutants could enter the scene every time we get a new Marvel property. But maybe, just maybe, this is finally the moment we get the X-Men in the MCU. According to my resident Marvel comics expert, the council Strange faces could be the Illuminati, which first appeared in the comics in 2005. They are a secret society that essentially serve as puppet masters of the universe, making decisions from the shadows. They, for instance, are responsible in the comics for blasting The Hulk into space to the planet Sakar, where we find him in Thor: Ragnarok. Their membership has historically included Namor, Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Black Bolt, and — you guessed it — both Professor X and Stephen Strange.
Wanda Maximoff is conspicuously not on the Illuminati’s roster, though, and we see the tension that might create in this trailer. I really like how one of the scenes featured here calls out a double standard. Wanda says, “When you break the rules, you become a hero. I do it and I become the enemy.” This nudges Scarlett Witch that much farther into villain or at least misunderstood anti-hero territory, which some fans sensed happening in WandaVision as well. I’m very much looking forward to seeing Elizabeth Olsen and Benedict Cumberbatch in a movie together, with considerable room to flex their acting skills by playing multiple variants of their characters at once. Talent of their caliber under the direction of Sam Raimi, who created the now iconic Toby McGuire Spider-Man trilogy and the Evil Dead franchise, gives me hope that Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness could be one for the books.