San Diego’s annual Comic-Con event has become the prime venue for Hollywood to show off its upcoming movies to tens of thousands of adoring fans. Here are the pick of this year’s specially prepared trailers, for those who couldn’t make it to southern California.
Justice League
Zack Snyder has a history of producing popular Comic-Con trailers that fail to translate into classic movies: both Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice had the San Diego masses in ecstasy, after all. So we should probably hold off before declaring this first proper look at Warner Bros’ answer to The Avengers a sign of DC Films’ imminent renaissance. But it does at least confirm that Snyder is doing his best to steer Justice League in a new, cheerier direction.
Ben Affleck’s Batman/Bruce Wayne is now setting out to track down as many metahumans as possible for a battle against a new threat, presumably the Darkseid-led parademon invasion we saw presaged in Batfleck’s freaky knightmare last time out. Jason Momoa’s Aquaman/Arthur Curry is gruff and brutish enough to divorce the DC hero from its hokey golden age roots and to ensure everyone forgets about Entourage. Ezra Miller’s The Flash looks like the comic relief: geeky, quirky and already at least a dozen times more interesting than his small screen equivalent (sorry Grant Gustin fans). Ray Fisher’s Cyborg is as downbeat and brooding as we might expect from a guy who’s been ripped apart and rebuilt with machine parts, Darth Vader style.
The key tonal shift from Dawn of Justice, already heavily hinted at by Snyder et al to journalists during a recent set visit to Warner Bros studios at Leavesden, is the jokes. Justice League appears to be heavy on the superhero badinage and light on Affleck’s tortured Batsoul. Hooray!
But has Snyder really learned his lesson? If the movie’s final act still ends up seeing the newly recruited team take down Darkseid and his winged swarmtroopers amid an orgy of CGI mega-destruction, the answer will clearly be no.
Wonder Woman
Can anyone tell me why Patty Jenkins’ film is being pitched in the first world war, when Wonder Woman’s comic book roots are in the second? Perhaps DC Films wants to avoid aping the 1940s setting of Marvel’s Captain America: The First Avenger, but it seems like an offbeat move.
Otherwise, Jenkins looks to have nailed the tone. The island of Themyscira is a suitably otherworldly paradise, Wonder Woman’s lasso (will they drop the “of truth” suffix?) seems to be made of lightning itself, and our hero, most importantly, has very little interest in letting the boys take the lead.
I’m already feeling sorry for the poor, foolish soldiers who decided it might be a great idea to invade Themyscira. Is this the catalyst for Wonder Woman to turn up in the world of men?
Suicide Squad
David Ayer’s supervillain romp hardly needs any more hype ahead of next month’s release in cinemas, but Warner have given us one last look in any case to show off the movie’s Skrillex and Twenty One Pilots-led soundtrack. We still don’t know who the squad are going up against, but evidence continues to suggest the big bad reveal might have something to do with Cara Delevingne’s Enchantress.
The day glo-inspired marketing campaign for Suicide Squad has been a thing of twisted beauty, and if the final product hits the same heights we could be looking at the year’s best comic book movie. It’s no wonder Margot Robbie’s gorgeously unhinged Harley Quinn is already being talked up as the new star of the DC extended universe.
Doctor Strange
Setting aside all the controversy over Tilda Swinton’s casting as The Ancient One, it’s impossible not to admire the ambition of Scott Derrickson’s Escher-like visuals in Marvel’s latest superhero origins story. Yet it’s still unclear quite why Benedict Cumberbatch’s Stephen Strange must learn to manipulate dimensions with the flick of a fingertip.
We know Mads Mikkelsen’s villain, Kaecilius, is at odds with the sorcerer supreme and his mentors, so perhaps the movie will climax with some kind of reality-twisting Battle Royale, as Manhattan is reconfigured as an endlessly shifting psychedelic 3D jigsaw puzzle of concrete and steel. Or maybe all this mind-expanding spectacle is only taking place inside our hero’s head. Either way, Doctor Strange looks set to take the Marvel “cinematic universe” into beguiling new territory, at least for anyone who’s never seen Inception.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
The Comic-Con trailer is certainly our most expansive look so far at JK Rowling’s return to the world of Harry Potter. We get to see several of the magical creatures who have escaped Newt Scamander’s Tardis-like briefcase and gone sight-seeing in 1926 New York, including a large, purple insect-like creature, a reptilian monster, a sloth-like beastie and a huge albino eagle. Still no first look at Samantha Morton’s evil, wizard-killing Mary Lou or her son Credence (Ezra Miller), but Carmen Ejogo’s witchy leader President Seraphina Picquery is suitably regal, and Alison Sudol’s Queenie looks like all kinds of trouble.
Who are those strange-looking, elf-like creatures who appear to be enjoying jazz-era high society? And might the goblin-like creature seen working a machine be one of Rowling’s newly introduced Pukwudgies, described as a “grey-faced, large-eared creature distantly related to the European goblin”?
Kong: Skull Island
If you wondered quite why the world needs another movie about the skyscraper-straddling giant ape, the simple answer is that Warner Bros hopes to give us a King Kong vs Godzilla movie in 2020, but first needs to set it up. This early look at next year’s film is heavy on the spectacle, but the key task for director Jordan Vogt-Roberts will be getting audiences interested in the humans who have arrived on Skull Island to meet their monkey nemesis. Colin Trevorrow’s recent Jurassic World is probably the template for success here, but the trailer doesn’t give us much evidence to suggest that Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson can be the Kongverse’s equivalent of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. Verdict: jury still out.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
If there’s one thing you can say about Guy Ritchie, it’s that he’s confident in his film-making toolbox. Nobody imagined the British director’s penchant for kinetic cutting and synapse-searing slo-mo/fast-mo combos would translate to the Sherlock Holmes stories, but Ritchie gave us a brace of (fairly decent) CGI-tastic Robert Downey Jr-led action romps nonetheless.
One imagines students of Arthurian legend brought up on TH White might be quite surprised to discover that the once and future king could easily have slipped into the cast of Snatch or Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels without anyone really noticing. Presumably the influence of Game of Thrones is to blame for the relocation of Camelot to a point just south of Sheffield.
Having said all that, Legend of the Sword looks like it might be rather fun. Sorry John Boorman, Nigel Terry et al, apparently the dark ages weren’t all that dreary and depressing after all.
