One of the highlights
of going to the cinema is watching a selection of films coming soon to tempt us
back into those hallowed halls of escapist fantasies.
However, what once
used to be tempting teasers, snippets of the joys yet to come, have recently
become little more than bullet points of every main scene of the entire film.
The first time this
was brought to my attention, was several years ago while watching a film on TV,
‘Associate’, starring Whoopie Goldberg. As the plot progressed, the feeling
that I’d seen it before increased, right down to the twist in the plot where
the main female character eventually had to pose as a white male in order to
convince the Wall Street Powers-That-Be to accept her financial genius, even
though she was a mere female.
Although I’d never
seen the film before, it was with disappointment that the story rolled to its somehow
familiar conclusion.
The weird sense of
déjà vu was explained by the fact that the entire film had been summarised in a
cinematic trailer I had seen previously.
This left an
unpleasant realisation that not only had I wasted an entire 90 minutes to see
what could be considered a mere lengthened version of the trailer, but that at
no point had the story kept me wondering what would happen. How could it when I
had already seen the abridge version?
Yes, the point of
trailers is to pack all the good bits of a film in a nice neat package in order
to make people want to pay their money to see it in it’s entirely, however, is
it getting to the point when the trailers give most of the main plot away
before the film has even opened?
The desperation to
show all the ‘best bits’ of a given film before release is overshadowing the
enjoyment of watching the plot unfold when the feature does eventually hit the
big screens.
If most of the main
shocks, plot twists or unexpected turns, not to mention the majority of the
story, have already been revealed during a ten minute trailer, the urge to
spend time and money on what can merely be regarded as ‘extra padding’, sadly
fails to motivate.
Perhaps it is a sad
reflection of diminishing concentration spans, or the ‘Need-to-Know-NOW’
culture that we must be shown a speeded up version to convince us how good the
film is going to be.
Perhaps the film
companies think potential audiences need to know what’s going to happen before
they can be enticed to go and see a film, rather than take a chance on a film
they know only a taste of. Perhaps, they are right.
Whatever the reasons,
I find myself fast forwarding DVD trailers and deliberately avoiding cinematic
attractions for the simple reason that I prefer not to know what’s going to
happen in advance.
Now, if you’ll excuse
me, I must flip to the end of the book I’m currently reading, because I just
can’t be bothered going through the whole thing to find out how it ends…
