Part 1 of Patrick's Trailer Park.

Patrick has decided to have a look back at some of his all time favourite trailers.

 

Trailers have become a huge marketing tool for movies and they have become even more important not that information hungry Fandom has them at there fingertips and on demand. Thanks YouTube! Today I’m going to look at five of my favourite trailers. (This is part 1 of 3)

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

This is the ultimate trailer. It has everything. It has trills, spills and lots more besides. When I first saw this trailer it blew my mind. I must have watched it a thousand times. It starts of slow but it builds to the perfect crescendo because of the brilliant use of the Requiem for A Dream music. It hits on all the important points from the last the movie and allows us the see the all action movie that we eventually got. Aragorn looks bad ass, we see the danger that faces Frodo and we see glimpses of the amazing Helm’s deep battle. One thing that is a possible point of contention is the appearance of Gandalf. Talk about Spoiler Alert!

2. Kingdom of Heaven

Despite the fact that the finished movie itself is poor, the trailer is good. Very good. It shows us the spectacular crusade scenes and gives us an indication of the scale of movie Ridley Scott had in store for us. Here again there are some great shots. Liam Neeson holsters his sword like a true warrior, Ed Norton’s masked King is shown slapping a knight in the face and we hear Jeremy Irons tell Orlando Bloom that “The King has no need for the perfect Knight”. The scoring of the trailer is chilling too. Plus I defy anyone to watch it and not be quoting the last line for the rest of the day. What the trailer did show us was that Orlando Bloom maybe a leading man, but he sure can’t lead men (see what I did there…).

3. House of Flying Daggers

This trailer is an example of how beautiful images and great scoring are sometimes all you need to create a great trailer. It’s amazing how we can tell what the story is about without the use of language. Again it shows that a great deal of human language is down to more that speaking. The choice of “Now We Are Free” from the Gladiator soundtrack is inspired suits the trailer brilliantly. This like The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers trailer this is addictive viewing.

4. Man of Steel (Trailer 2)

This is one of those trailers I watched over and over again last summer in anticipation of Zack Snyder’s blockbuster. It makes this list for a special reason. It flips the blockbuster trailer convention on its head. This is a more reflective take on the superhero genre. This has to be on a grander scale, it is Superman, the grandfather of the superhero. The tone is perfect and the images glorious. The music “Elegy to a Storm” is amazing. It gives the trailer a modern, yet classical feel. A feeling of something otherworldly. Despite how you feel  about the movie, you have to admit, this trailer is damn good!

5. Marvel’s Avenger’s Assemble

Again this is all about being epic (in the comic book movie sense). When Chris Evan (Cap) says “Trying to get me back into the world?” and Sam Jackson’s line “Trying to save it.” always gets me. This is how blockbusters should be sold. It’s all about the set up, the evil the good guys will face, the characters and the feel. Here we can tell that the movie is going to be popcorn fun. We can tell it’s going to be witty and clever. We can tell that the characters we saw separately will be great together. But perhaps most importantly from the trailer we can’t tell what exactly is going to happen and that is a good thing. Most trailers give too much away but this does just enough to have us drooling over what was to arrive at multiplexes. And it didn’t disappoint.

Read Part 2 and 3 later this week to find out more of Patrick favourite trailers!