5. “Godzilla Minus One”
“I want to protect her future,” a father intones with great apprehension. Sometimes, going back to basics revisiting the past from a modern lens is just what the doctor ordered. And that seems to be the case with Toho Studios’ Godzilla reboot, “Godzilla Minus One,” which takes the franchise right back to 1945 at the end of WWII. “Godzilla” was always born out of post-nuclear tensions and anxieties, and this new version, directed by Takashi Yamazaki, seems to launch itself from Japan’s post-atomic bomb fears. This trailer is gritty and real-feeling, replete with the visceral terror of your city and country being ripped apart by monumental forces you just cannot control. “Godzilla Minus One” feels a lot like a “Batman Begins,” starting over and making everything throb with an authenticity that feels all too frightening, even if at its center is a fantastical creature. Legendary could stand to take notes.
4. “Poor Things”
“This is Bella,” Willem Dafoe says in a Germanic voice as a duck squawks, harp notes pluck away, and Emma Stone waddles onto the screen, braying like a drug-up sheep. It’s the perfect introduction to one of the strangest but most beguiling movies of the year and another excellently bizarre offering from Greek Weird Wave filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, who really earns that title this year. “She’s an experiment; her brain and her body are not quite synchronized,” Dafoe says as the movie bursts into color, picks up speed, and those harp notes begin to go wonderfully warp. “Poor Things” centers on the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist (Dafoe), and try as we might to try and explain this deliciously odd enchantment, oh boy, even the trailer needs to be seen to be believed.
3. “The Killer”
“Stick to your plan, don’t improvise.” The trailer for David Fincher’s assassin thriller, “The Killer” with Michael Fassbender, is great, but the rapid-fire teaser trailer that communicates process, process, process, and then alarm when things go wrong is wickedly entertaining and engrossing. “Trust no one, forbid empathy,” Fassbender says as the trailer rockets away to scorching and propulsive Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross music, juxtaposed next to images of Fassbender smashing cell phones and preparing, preparing, and preparing. “Stick to the plan,” he says with the implication, through all these chaotic images, the central conceit of it all: that plan goes awry quickly and early. It’s just totally captivatingly put together, and you might just find you’ve kept your breath held for its entire 1 minute and 14 seconds of full-throttle images.
2. “Oppenheimer”
“We imagine a future, and our imaginings horrify us.” Starting off with that chilling nuclear fireball image, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” trailer escalates beautifully, starting slow and thoughtful with rumbles and flashes of atomic terrors, while Cillian Murphy’s J.Robert Oppenheimer carefully intones about the meaning and severity of what they’re about to unleash on the world, seemingly he only with the full capacity to understand its full, no-going-back gravity. Cutting back between surreal images of nuclear fissure tests and scientific images capturing ideas of physics, to flesh and blood men building bombs, “Oppenheimer” the movie has a huge stellar cast that it could exploit here. Instead, Nolan and co. stay the course for his moral thriller, making sure to ask the big question of it all: “I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon.” The way it builds symphonically is breathtaking too, not unlike Nolan’s stellar movie itself.
1. “Dune: Part Two” Trailer 2
“This world is beyond cruelty,” Timothée Chalamet says at the beginning of the newest trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” flashes of war imagery cutting to the rhythm of his internal dialogue (“Do you believe in me?”). It’s essentially just a collection of poetic images laid out over dialogue, some of them somber, some of them filled with grim intensity, ferocious portraits of war, and the solemn sense of burden, purpose, and duty that pervades Dune (“It’s not a prophecy, it’s a story,”). In the wrong hands, the humorlessness of Villeneuve’s work in the “Dune” series is just poison. But the precision, control, and mastery of all these spaces, these characters, these striking images are such a serious wonder to behold, transcends any need for relief or levity. Villeneuve’s films are so visceral and authentic feeling, they demand to be taken seriously. And this trailer with its doom, gloom and purpose, just hits all the right notes of, “damn, this is gonna be a space opera for the ages.” “Paul Atredeis is still alive,” indeed.
Dishonorable Mention
“Madame Web”
“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died,” Dakota Johnson says lifelessly in an unfeeling monotone in the new trailer for ‘Spider-Man‘ spinoff, “Madame Web,” and a meme was born (and let’s face it, memes usually do not go viral within 24 hours of a trailer being released, but that’s exactly what happened here). What is this movie about? Holy crap, who knows, but it’s been mocked and derided for a good reason; it looks terrible, with online audiences already suggesting it could be worse than the turgid Spider-man spin-off “Morbius” which is really saying something given how much of a dumpster fire that picture was.
