Thor Ragnarok Did It Better Than Star Wars
Another Star Wars movie, another viral teaser trailer.
Just like any other Star Wars fan, when the new teaser trailer came out for The Last Jedi, I clambered home from work to watch it in all its epic glory on my should-be-bigger television only to feel as if I had fallen asleep halfway through it.
These are the sequence of emotions that rushed through me when I first watched the teaser that was released roughly a month ago: I got really pumped before watching the teaser, next I felt super excited as I watched the thing, and then when the trailer ended I desperately tried to feel enthusiastic about what I had just watched, only to feel a little…empty.
I felt as if I had in fact just watched something exciting, I just wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be excited about exactly.
You see, the new marketing campaign for The Last Jedi suffers from the same problem that the first film in the new trilogy suffered from: lack of information. I go into more detail about that here.
I know that it’s a teaser and that it’s kind of the point of teasers to not get plot heavy. “Well of course it didn’t give you any information,” some online troll might say. “It’s trying to tease you, idiot. Get it? Teaser trailer?”
But here’s the thing. In my estimation, a teaser is meant to tease us about something that we previously didn’t know, not about things that are super obvious.
Showing us beautifully shot sequences of Luke training Rey is the type of thing that we all expected which is precisely why the teaser felt a little uninspiring. (And yes, Luke did drop something of an unexpected bombshell on us at the tail end, but I’ll get to that in a sec.)
Here’s an idea: why not try showing us something we didn’t know?
What about the mysterious Supereme Leader Snoke? Does he have some master plan at work here? What about Kylo Renn? What’s his status after having been unrealistically humiliated by Rey in The Force Awakens? We get a quick glimpse of Kylo, but nothing more, nothing substantive.
Of course a teaser trailer can go too far in divulging too much of a story’s plot, much like Spiderman: Homecoming did, but it’s smart to share a few rock solid things about the story that we as the audience can latch onto.
Okay, so what about Luke’s decree at the end. Of course that needs to be addressed.
“I only know one truth,” Luke somberly states. “It’s time for the Jedi to end.”
The Jedi need to end… Okay, so what does that even mean? I refuse to speculate on the subject because it could literally mean anything, and I hate open ended statements such as this that don’t have any context. Much like when Luke asks Rey what she sees during what must be some kind of vision, she replies, “Light. Darkness. The balance.”
You couldn’t be a bit more specific there, Rey?
As for what Luke meant, he could have meant just that, that he’s going to dismantle the entire Jedi order. Sad day. Or it could mean that the Jedi need to evolve into an even greater class of protectors; something similar to the Jedi, but better. Or it could simply mean that after his failure with Kylo Renn, that he simply needs to restart the order afresh.
Dang. I just speculated. I guess they’re marketing is working, but I’m still not happy about it. For a more in depth analysis of what Luke might have meant about the Jedi, Byrne Reese goes into more detail here.
As you can tell, I have some problems with the whole Star Wars marketing campaign. The Force Awakens’s trailers were just as vague as The Last Jedi’s.
So what does a good teaser trailer look like?
No one would have thought, but Marvel’s upcoming Thor Ragnarok created a near perfect teaser trailer. It didn’t give away the entire plot, but it gave us enough of an idea as to what the movie is actually about to effectively pique the world’s interest.
What we do know is that Cate Blanchett’s villain, Hela, has come to destroy Asgard. Super original, I know, but we also see that she momentarily defeats Thor by shattering Mjolnir. She should know better than to break Thor’s hammer…
Next we discover that Thor has been conscripted into gladiatorial service and gets pitted against his “friend from work”, the Incredible Hulk!
Now this is going to be fun.
Do we really know what the plot is precisely? Not really. Of course Thor is going to have to defeat Hela — storytelling conventions and all that — but the details are left out, as they should be. But what the teaser does well is establishing several conflicts for the hero to overcome.
Not only will he have to save Asgard, but he also has to deal with an enormous green rage monster with breathtaking anger management issues who happens to be one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel universe. He also has to come up with a way to cope without his precious Mjolnir for a period of time until Elrond shows up to save the day with a reforged sword…er, hammer. Wait, wrong trilogy…
What conflict did The Last Jedi present to us for us fans to salivate over? Well… we know that… certain things will happen and that it will involve the main characters.
That’s about it.
For goodness sakes, the poster for The Last Jedi tells us more about the movie than the teaser does!
What exactly will Rey be up against in The Last Jedi? Kylo Renn? I’m sorry, but based on his performance in The Force Awakens, he won’t be much of an obstacle this go around. He was barely a villain to begin with. The most villainous thing he did was kill Papa Solo, and that was pretty cowardly to begin with.
So who are we left with? Yes, Supreme Leader Snoke is out there, but he’s not exactly imposing, at least not yet. You know, because we don’t know a dang thing about him…
It would have been great if the teaser had actually teased us with some obstacle, some sense of where the plot is at least heading. But as it is, all we can really do at this point is stare in awe at the pretty cinematography and speculate wildly as to what Luke’s cryptic statement regarding the Jedi actually means.
Until then, Thor Ragnarok gives us something to actually look forward to: Thor v Hulk!
