Trailer Trashin’: Super Bowl XLIX Movie Spot Roundup

Another Super Bowl has come and gone – my congratulations to the New England Patriots, and my sympathies to the Seattle Seahawks. But for cinephiles like me, the main draw of the Big Game is the new TV spots for upcoming movies. This year, there were a staggering fourteen movie spots shown during Super Bowl XLIX, and in this edition of Trailer Trashin’, I’ll give you my quick takes on some of them.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Premise: With S.H.I.E.L.D. destroyed and the Avengers needing a hiatus from stopping threats to humanity, Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) attempts to jumpstart a dormant peacekeeping program with Ultron (James Spader), a self-aware, self-teaching, artificial intelligence. But the plan backfires when Ultron decides that humans are the real enemy and sets out to eradicate them from the Earth, and it is up to Iron Man, Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), along with support from Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), to stop him from carrying out his plans. Along the way, the Avengers encounter the powerful twins Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), as well as the android Vision (Paul Bettany).

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My take: As I made clear in a recent column, I’m ridiculously excited for Avengers: Age of Ultron, the next entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That said, this spot was a bit underwhelming. I didn’t see any new footage, just a shortened version of what we saw in the most recent trailer. Of course, there’s still three months until the movie comes out, so we’re certain to get at least one more full trailer. But no matter what, I plan to be there opening weekend.

ANTICIPATION: Moviegoers, assemble!

Jurassic World

Premise: Twenty-two years after the events of Jurassic Park (1993), Isla Nublar, off Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, now features a fully functioning dinosaur theme park, Jurassic World, as originally envisioned by John Hammond. This new park is owned by the Masrani Global Corporation. Owen (Chris Pratt), a member of the park’s on-site staff, conducts behavioral research on the Velociraptors. At the corporation’s request, the park’s geneticists create the Indominus Rex, a genetically modified hybrid dinosaur, to boost visitor attendance, but it soon escapes and runs wild on the island.

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My take: By far my favorite of the Super Bowl spots, Jurassic World just looks like a ridiculously fun time. We get a better look at Indominus Rex (“untameable king”), the new hybrid dinosaur that appears to serve as the main heavy of the film. It appears to basically look like a Tyrannosaur with an armored back and much longer, more functional arms. And it looks like the main conflict of the movie will be Chris Pratt’s character Owen and his tamed Velociraptors against the I. Rex, and hopefully with the Tyrannosaurus coming to save the day in the climax. And if you compare the shots that were featured in both this spot and the first trailer, it’s clear that Industrial Light and Magic has refined and improved the visual effects from what we saw last time. At this point, there’s no doubt that I’ll be checking this one out on opening weekend.

ANTICIPATION: Shut up and take my money, Universal!

Tomorrowland

Premise: Bound by their shared destiny, Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a bright, optimistic teen bursting with scientific curiosity, and Frank Walker (George Clooney), a former boy-genius inventor jaded by disillusionment, embark on a danger-filled mission to unearth the secrets of an enigmatic place somewhere in time and space that exists in their collective memory as “Tomorrowland.”

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My take: Of the big tent pole films coming out this summer, Tomorrowland is probably the most mysterious. And you know what, I’m cool with that. It’s nice to occasionally go into a film not knowing basically everything that’s going to happen. I like the sort of retro-futuristic look of Tomorrowland itself, and I definitely think this will be a throwback to old-school optimistic science-fiction. Right now, this one is definitely going in the “Want to See” column.

ANTICIPATION: (singing) “There’s a place called Tomorrow(land). A place of joy, not of sorrow. Can’t you see, it’s a place for you and me!”

Terminator Genisys

Premise: On the verge of winning the war against Skynet, John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends his trusted lieutenant Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back through time to save the life of John’s mother and ensure his own existence. But Kyle finds that the original past has changed. After being orphaned at age nine by a T-800 sent back to alter the future by killing her when she was young, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) has been brought up by another Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) programmed to protect her. This Terminator has spent the intervening years training Sarah to face her destiny, which she has tried to reject. Now Kyle and Sarah, with the help of the old Terminator, have to escape a newer T-800 (Aaron V. Williamson) and a T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun) sent by Skynet to kill them.

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My take: It’s been really disheartening to watch the slow devolution of the Terminator franchise. Other than the TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is an awesome show that not nearly enough people have seen, nothing that’s been done with Terminator without James Cameron has been good. Arnold Schwarzenegger is sixty-seven years old, and watching him here feels like the cinematic equivalent of your middle-aged uncle trying to still act like the star athlete he was in college. Unless it ends up getting really good reviews, I’ll be giving Terminator Genisys a miss when it opens in July.

ANTICIPATION: I won’t be back.

Furious 7

Premise: After defeating Owen Shaw and his gang, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), and the rest of the crew are finally able to return to the United States and again live the normal lives they wanted. But Owen’s older brother Ian Shaw (Jason Statham) is after Dominic, seeking revenge for the death of his brother, and puts the entire crew in danger once more. After learning that Ian caused the death of their friend Han, the crew sets out to find the man who killed one of their own, before he finds them first.

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My take: For the sake of full disclosure, I haven’t seen any of the Fast and Furious movies, just because the subject matter didn’t really interest me. And since we’re at the seventh film in the series, I don’t know if it’s too late for me to jump in. That said, this looks like everything fans of the series have come to expect. And the moment of Vin Diesel driving his car through the side of a skyscraper, the car flying through the air through the side of an adjacent skyscraper, and Diesel bailing out inside the building before his car flies out the other side and plummets to the ground, is something I can’t remember seeing before.

ANTICIPATION: This might be a ride I should take.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Premise: Harry Hart (Colin Firth), an agent for a super-secret spy organization, recruits Gary “Eggsy” Unwin (Taron Egerton), an unrefined but promising street kid, into the agency’s ultra-competitive training program just as a global threat emerges from twisted tech genius Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson).

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My take: I am ridiculously excited for this movie. I’d never heard of the comic book series, but as soon as I saw a sharp-dressed Colin Firth kicking ass and taking names, I was sold. Matthew Vaughn is probably one of the best action directors working today, and it looks like he’s bringing us some wonderful mayhem here. Add in a great cast, and you’ve got what I consider the recipe for a good time at the movies. At this point, there’s no question that I’ll be checking out Kingsman: The Secret Service when it drops next weekend.

ANTICIPATION: This looks bloody brilliant!