Charles Bramesco
New ‘Alien: Covenant’ Trailer Teases the Return (and Fate) of Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw
In space… no one can hear your crackly John Denver records. The timeless country standard “Take Me Home, Country Road” provides an eerie soundtrack for the latest peek at Ridley Scott’s long-time-coming Alien prequel Covenant. Over some rather breathtaking shots of a hostile, foreign world (no offense, New Zealand), we hear the familiar ode to the beauty of the American South, contrasting the harsh new climate with mental pictures of the gentle, rolling hills of West Virginia. Things get progressively creepier as the Xenomorph descends on our motley crew of intergalactic colonists, scaling their spacecraft and trying to get at the humans inside like they’re the filling of a delicious meaty empanada.
Katherine Heigl Won’t Let You Off the Horse in Latest ‘Unforgettable’ Trailer
Sure, maybe April is early to declare a movie that hasn‘t even been screened for the public yet to be the best of the year. (It’s only the third of the month, so who knows, it might be early to declare anything the best of April.) And yet, watching the latest trailer for the upcoming Katherine Heigl/Rosario Dawson erotic thriller Unforgettable, I feel secure in my convictions. The first trailer was a whirlwind of psycho ex-girlfriend-sploitation, replete with darkly surreal home invasions, laptop-assisted masturbation, and Heigl’s super-serious killer-face. The final trailer has surfaced today, and if you weren’t convinced that this film will be an unassailable masterpiece — for people obsessed with low-rent suspense pieces about sexual obsession, such as myself — then Heigl’s got six words for you:
‘An Inconvenient Sequel’ Trailer: Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die Unless Someone Does Something
In 2006, environmental conservation advocate and former Presidential candidate Al Gore unveiled his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a call to action regarding the urgent dangers of global warming. And that was that — viewers recognized the importance of preserving the planet, green technology completely supplanted carbon-emitting fossil fuels, and Earth got back on track towards a clean bill of health. Ha! No, the opposite is true, and we’re all going to get swallowed up by a great deluge sent by Mother Gaia. As our recently inducted Commander-in-Chief prepares to gut the EPA like a trout (and enjoy that analogy, because at this rate, our grandchildren will not know what a trout is), things are getting worse than ever, and it falls to Gore once again to remind us that we are literally killing ourselves.
John Cena Voices a Friendly Spanish Cartoon Bull in the Adorable ‘Ferdinand’ Trailer
Though he looks like he eats cement and can crack dudes in half like Bane snapping Batman across his knee, John Cena’s just a big ol’ softie on the inside. The professional fighter has always been warm and cordial to his many fans, he loves posting dumb jokes online (the ultimate Celebrities! They‘re Just Like Us move), and he proved himself a game comic performer in 2015’s Trainwreck with Amy Schumer and Sisters starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. In this respect, he’s the perfect choice to voice Ferdinand, a mighty bull with a kind and gentle heart. If the role was any more squarely in Cena’s wheelhouse, he’d be romancing an esteemed comedic actress.
See Spidey’s Tricked-Out New Suit in New ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ Trailer
The suit makes the man, and that’s seldom more true than for the superhero set. Batman would be another joe-schmo billionaire industrialist without the arsenal of weaponry built into his armor, Iron Man would literally die without his hardware, and now we can add Peter Parker to the list of superheroes whose own clothes act as unofficial sidekick. In the latest trailer for upcoming threeboot Spider-Man: Homecoming, we get a glimpse of some nifty new modifications (courtesy of Stark Industries) to Spidey’s trademark red-and-blue spandex. A new generation’s Spider-Man needs some modern upgrades, and the latest iteration of the suit includes a detachable mini-drone and what I can only describe as “skintight suction technology.”
Unite the League with Character-Specific Teases for the Full ‘Justice League’ Trailer
Writing about the latest developments in movie-centric news isn’t a bad job, by any means — I could be mining ore and plucking chickens like my Eastern European forefathers — but some days still make you wanna sharpen up your morning coffee with something a little stronger. The recent trend of movie studios airing brief mini-trailers to tease the release of upcoming slightly-longer trailers numbers among my least favorite developments in online buzz-cultivating, and leave it to Zack Snyder and the DC cinematic universe to take that to the next level. Running a trailer for the trailer is some weak-ass bull, the sort of thing those nerds at Marvel would do — this is DC, baby, where they run five trailers for the trailer.
‘Baywatch’ Trailer: More Intentional Comedy, Same Amount of Slo-Mo Running
It’s weird — with every new trailer, the upcoming big-screen reboot of beloved ‘90s TV series Baywatch appears to get a little bit better. The first trailer promised a lightly amusing clone of the smart-alecky 21 Jump Street reboot, the second trailer advertised a competently-produced action tentpole with a healthy sprinkling of meta humor, and now, the so-called “official” trailer (does that make the first two unofficial?) teases what appears to be a sincerely funny comedy. At the very least, whoever cut this thing made it abundantly clear that stars Zac Efron and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson have more chemistry than an eighth-grade science class.
Latest ‘Smurfs: The Lost Village’ Trailer Pits Smurf Against Smurf
It was established last week that we may all have to do quite a bit of waiting before we get a peek at James Cameron’s many Avatar sequels. Who’d have guessed that the best thing to tide us over until then would be the latest film featuring the Smurfs? The latest trailer for Smurfs: The Lost Village looks rather familiar, as a search party goes on an expedition to a land filled with bioluminescent wildlife, weird and mighty beasts, and peaceable blue-skinned natives. As one Smurf so elegantly puts it, “It‘s like a workout for your eyes!” Indeed, those viewers looking for a lush vision of a hidden world may be in luck.
‘Geostorm’ Trailer Brings Rain of Bats, Fire Tornadoes, and Gerard Butler
It’s odd — as our planet rapidly hurdles towards any number of very real oblivions, disaster-porn movies have started to play a little more fancifully. ‘Malfunctioning weather-controlling spacecraft triggers climate cataclysms’ sounds like a kinda quaint way for the world to end, as opposed to nuclear holocausts or World War III or a total breakdown of humanity’s societal order. It’s been a minute since the Earth last swallowed up its inhabitants with the earthquake-sploitation picture San Andreas, and frankly, it’s just a relief to see a fictitious vision of the apocalypse that’s not entirely our fault.
Brad Pitt Looks Like a Counter-Terrorism Ken Doll in ‘War Machine’ Trailer
Unless your name happens to be Kathryn Bigelow (and if it is, then may I say that it’s a pleasure, Ms. Bigelow, big Point Break fan), Hollywood has had a lot of trouble figuring out how to portray the Global War on Terror. The odd movies that have succeeded critically or financially — Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper — take an ambivalent stance on a complicated and nuanced geopolitical situation, but many more have attempted the same and floundered. So it’s with memories of the high-profile failure of one-time Oscar hopeful Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk that we greet the trailer for War Machine, Netflix’s latest foray into this risky genre.