This weekend wraps up with a trailer for Joss Whedon’s upcoming Much Ado About Nothing.
Unlike Saturday’s trailer for The Grandmaster, this clip can hardly wait to get Whedon’s name onscreen (even mentioning The Avengers afterward, just to make sure every single person watching has had their interest piqued). The rest of the trailer follows suit, and is inundated with accolade after accolade until the actual footage almost seems like an afterthought.
All of this tends to work wonders in terms of building hype for a film, but where The Grandmaster‘s trailer demonstrated exactly why its product was so great (by showing off high-intensity martial arts), there is little footage in Much Ado‘s trailer to convey just what it is about Whedon’s film that is so marvelous. All we see are the basic building blocks. A dash of expository dialog. The requisite sex and violence used to sell Shakespeare to a crowd that considers Shakespeare boring and stuffy. Aside from these elements and a few quick glimpses at some clever camera technique, there’s no explanation as to why Whedon’s version of Shakespeare is so unique(other than that his frequent collaborators Clark Gregg and Nathan Fillion are involved). The trailer ends up being all tell and no show; giving the impression that Much Ado About Nothing is the one film we need to see this year, yet never really telling us why.
