Zack Snyder makes movies, but he was born for trailers. It shouldn’t be a surprise. His painterly, slow-motion, Terrence Malick–on-creatine style is best applied to impressionistic flashes of lush, color-treated scenery and powerful humans standing astride the wind. In quick bursts, he is a maestro. At the beginning of his career, fresh out of art school after studying painting and filmmaking, he began in the advertising business, working as a hired gun for beer companies and automakers. He quickly became one of the most celebrated commercial directors of his generation, winning Clios for executing sweeping, tongue-in-cheek concepts and captivating the leaking minds of Americans waiting for the Super Bowl to come back on.
His movie career is different. His obsession with hyperarticulated, animalistic, virile portraits of masculinity in particular has made him one of the most anticipated, confounding, and ultimately disappointing filmmakers of the 21st century. But for a specific sector of the moviegoing public, his trailers always get the dander up. He has made eight movies, each one with an exceptional trailer, each one with one small problem. Take, for example, the first look we got at Man of Steel, his interpretation of the Superman myth.
Man of Steel, of course, is a movie about aliens punching each other into skyscrapers. But the visions we see in Snyder’s first teaser trailer are of a rusting pastoral America, all amber waves of grain and becaped children aspiring to heroism and patriotism, maybe not in that order. Teasers are unnatural advertisements, meant to ramp up excitement months and sometimes years ahead of a movie’s release. They do what they say, teasing one aspect of a movie—in this case, the calloused hands of the American worker and the skybound flight of the American superhero. There’s nothing about General Zod or Krypton or any of that punching stuff. The above teaser premiered 11 months before Man of Steel reached theaters. By the time it arrived, the movie was being sold with extended trailers like this one.
This is Field of Dreams With X-Ray Vision, a cascading portrait of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. But it’s not Man of Steel. Trailers lie all the time. In some cases, they need to. Sometimes a psychological allegory like Mother! is positioned to look like a horror movie. Sometimes a methodical thriller like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is made to seem like a corkscrew murder mystery. And sometimes a matriarchal nightmare like Hereditary is made to look like a portrait of a disturbed adolescent girl. Hiding the truth is a gift and a curse. Some horror fans were bummed to find out It Comes at Night was actually a post-apocalyptic family drama. Others moviegoers were tricked into thinking that Lost in Translation was a wacky fish-out-of-water comedy. Over and over, it remains true. Trailers: You can’t trust them.
An advertisement, by its nature, is an enticement, a promise of a perfectly calibrated experience, of something you need even if you didn’t realize you could want it. I can’t blame Snyder—and the team at Warner Bros. and the independent houses hired to cut these trailers—for selling a movie he didn’t quite make. Marketing is no fun—most of the time, it’s a puzzle with no solution. Even for good movies. But it’s interesting that Snyder’s movie didn’t pick up a cue from the man who produced the film and personally blessed Snyder’s vision: Christopher Nolan.
Ten years ago this week, Nolan’s populist masterwork was released. The Dark Knight is a crime movie, a love triangle, a class commentary, an urban drama, and a true-blue comic book that shows the heroes, the villains, and the razor-wire that separates the two. It was also a big, fat hit. And the trailer doesn’t lie.
It’s all in there: a crime-torn city, a dashing hero bound by dilemma, a damsel, a chaos agent, fire, explosions, a wise butler, a slithering politician, a flying Batman, a cackling Joker, every relevant set piece, and yet somehow it withholds. It features the three best shots in the movie.
It features the best line of dialogue: “You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It features the film’s actual Hans Zimmer score. (Unlike in Snyder’s teaser, which uses the preexisting “Elegy” by Lisa Gerrard and Patrick Cassidy.) It ends with the film’s best (only?) joke. For years, we complained about movie trailers giving away too much plot, too many sequences, too much of everything. The Dark Knight holds back on nothing but the reveal of Harvey Dent’s Two-Face turn, and even then, it’s heavily implied. Is the lesson to give it all away? Of course not. But when you have the goods, it doesn’t matter.
This memorable stunt, recounted in a recent story on Polygon, marked a kind of turning point in superhero action, before green screens became the primary backdrop for battling baddies. It’s here as a lure. Seeing it in a flash didn’t hurt.
The film’s iconic second trailer—edited by John Ibsen, now a vice president at Disney—is almost entirely devoted to mythologizing Heath Ledger’s performance. The phrases—“Why so serious?”; “Hit me!”; “A little fight in ya, I like that.”; “Let’s put a smile on that face!”—are all here. The fast-cutting glimpses of his face. The handclap. That cackle, twice. Ledger’s Oscar campaign essentially starts here.
The Dark Knight went on to earn more than $1 billion around the world, created a kind of panic for the Oscars, and completely redefined the ceiling on a film of this kind, for better and worse. It inspired Marvel’s reign, moved Nolan into the highest class of filmmaker, and unfurled a new paradigm of movie fandom. It all started in these commercials.
