By now everyone on Earth has probably already seen the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer. With good cause, of course. It’s an impressive preview of one of the most anticipated films in history, full of exciting new images, promising new action sequences, and portentous dialogue that assures us will reshape our knowledge of this unforgettable franchise.
But it is, and this is very important, just a trailer. Star Wars: The Force Awakens may be incredible, but we won’t know until we see it. All we know right now is that the marketing is fantastic. It’s may behoove us all to remember that Hollywood has misled us before. Good trailers for bad movies have long been the bane of movie-lovers everywhere, stoking our interest, snatching our money, and leaving us woefully unprepared for an enormous letdown.
Related: The Internet Dissects the ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Trailer
We’ll find out for certain if Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the great film is promises to be, but for now, let’s take a quick look at seven highly anticipated movies with trailers that thrilled our imaginations, but that ultimately – as many audience members see it – sucked.
Godzilla (1998)
The filmmakers you gave us Independence Day, one of the pop culture events of the decade, were about to give us the Godzilla movie we (thought we) always wanted. Bigger visual effects than ever, a bigger monster than ever. And to get us hyped up they revealed these awesome teaser trailers, featuring scenes not in the movie, in which hapless New Yorkers ran afoul of the giant, terrible lizard. The fisherman teaser (above) is the best, but an honorable mention goes to this other teaser, which gives a stiff middle finger to Jurassic Park.
What Happened: Audiences saw the danged thing, of course. The monster was hardly ever witnessed on screen, and when it was, it was usually shrouded in darkness. The all-star cast turned out to be giving cheesy performances that made the already cutesy acting from Independence Day look like Shakespeare in the Park. The giant monster took a backset for 1/3 of the movie so the heroes could run from lame velociraptor knockoffs. Godzilla was, in no uncertain terms, a colossal misfire.
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)
The first new teaser for a Star Wars movie in nearly two decades gave the fans a glimpse of the future. Motion-captured characters, impossible beasts, incredible action sequences, old characters with new and young faces. It teased the importance of the storyline without giving much of it away. It was the trailer that would have broken the internet if the internet worked properly yet. Many of us waited for hours for this thing to download, just to get a glimpse of The Phantom Menace‘s wonders.
What Happened: Fans went gaga, of course. It took a long time for many of us to admit that there were flaws with the movie, and even longer to admit that the flaws were serious. The hype machine blinded many Star Wars fans to the terrible dialogue, wooden acting and ultra-thin plotting. Except for Jar-Jar Binks, of course. Everyone hated him right away.
Pearl Harbor (2001)
Michael Bay’s first stab at “legitimate” cinema, Pearl Harbor, emerged in the wake of Titanic. The scope, the romanticism for a bygone era, and the focus on our collective, tragic history was keeping hope aloft that this movie would be an all-time classic. And this trailer, featuring many of the (admittedly beautifully shot) movie’s most impressive images, juxtaposed with some of the most portentous words ever uttered by an American president, promised us that this movie would actually deliver.
What Happened: The script was junk, that’s what happened. The sappy love story took up far more screen time than Pearl Harbor itself, and the blank-faced performances from Josh Hartnett and Ben Affleck, in particular, couldn’t elevate the dime-store romance material. Pearl Harbor turned out to be lousy history and lousy storytelling, albeit in a pretty package. It made money at the time, but now it’s considered an enormous mistake.
The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
The unexpected hit of 1999 was kicking off a franchise that, fans hoped, would become the next Star Wars. Innovative visual effects, epic storylines and high-concept sci-fi would intertwine and give us the ultimate cinematic spectacle. And this trailer had spectacle to spare. Crazy stunts, elaborate fight scenes, crazy new plot points and more. The Matrix Reloaded was definitely going to be the next big thing.
What Happened: What nobody noticed at the time – or at least, what nobody focused on – was the heavy-handed dialogue that made it sound like Wachowski Starship was taking this whole series far too seriously. We should have heeded those warnings. Although the action was indeed kickass, the movie itself began delivering awkward, heady philosophy that sounded good but failed to drive the story forward. What’s more, our hero Neo was so enormously overpowered now that the suspense died every time he was on-screen. There is a reason The Matrix is considered a classic, and there is a reason that the sequels are not.
Terminator: Salvation (2009)
After years of recycling the same time travel storyline again and again, the Terminator series was finally taking us all the way into the future, when man would fight machine to the death. Respected actor Christian Bale was taking over as the heroic John Connor, who seemed to populated a thrilling landscape full of new and exciting mechanical terrors. And a plot about a Terminator who thought it was human could have been just the thing this series needed: a new evolution to redraw the battle lines forever.
What Happened: It turns out that Christian Bale wasn’t actually in the film all that much, and that most of the story surrounded the completely unremarkable Marcus Wright, whose big “twist” was given away in the trailer itself. What’s more, most of the plot was about Skynet kidnapping Kyle Reese, John Connor’s father, to lure its sworn enemy into a trap. Never mind that simply killing Kyle Reese – which Skynet had ample time to do – would have ended the war immediately by preventing Connor from ever being born. The trailer’s awesome action was once again a smoke screen for a terrible plot, and audiences balked.
Sucker Punch (2011)
Whoa, what the heck is THIS?! Sexy schoolgirls living out live-action (well, live-action plus CGI) fantasies straight out of our anime fantasies? An original action spectacular from the director of 300, a film that rewrote the rulebook for action movies (for a little while)? Sucker Punch promised to be the empowering feminist action saga of our time, full of amazing imagery and a story that… wait, what’s the story again?
What Happened: It turns out the story was a dream-within-a-dream miasma of anachronistic nonsense, that’s what. Characters from 50 years ago living out fantasies based on sci-fi concepts that wouldn’t be invented for decades, fighting back against a tyranny so awful that Zack Snyder couldn’t actually bring himself to show it. Sexuality so dangerous that it could only be cut away from, so that no one in the audience felt anything, and instead were only placated by explosions that symbolized Zack Snyder’s already symbolic images of oppression. It was an impressive production that produced very little, and now it’s considered one of the worst films of the decade.
Prometheus (2012)
Ridley Scott was returning to the long-troubled Alien franchise, and he was taking us back to the beginning. The big questions would asked, this trailer assured us, about live, the universe and everything. The epic scope of the film would be beyond anything the Alien series had ever offered us before, with an all-star cast and an ambitious that most Hollywood blockbusters could only dream of. Beautiful imagery abounded, and thrills were definitely promised.
What Happened: It turns out that Ridley Scott had every intention of asking important questions, but was holding off on the real answers until the sequels. Sure, it was beautifully realized, but Prometheus shied away from the important topics and instead fell into generic monster movie territory, with brilliant scientists doing dumb things just so they could be killed on camera, and explosions galore. Prometheus talked a big game. Then it struck out.
Photo: LucasFilm
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
