Trailer Tracking, Super Bowl Edition: ‘John Carter,’ ‘The Avengers,’ ‘Battleship,’ ‘GI Joe 2: Retaliation’

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Movie: “The Avengers”

Best Parts of the Trailer: Hulk smash!; nice shots of the Avengers assembling; some very decent superhero smackdown FX; palpable sense of fun

Worst Parts of the Trailer: Chris Hemsworth’s hair looked WAY better in the “Thor” movie; when it reminded us that it isn’t May yet…

OUR TAKE: My number one concern when they announced that they were going to do a live-action “Avengers” movie was that, due to the crush of characters and Marvel Studios’ notoriously tight purse strings, that we’d be rewarded with two hours of superheroes bickering while almost never using their superpowers. And that’s not what I wanted. Heck, that’s not what anyone wants from an “Avengers” movie. If I’m going to see a movie with Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, and Iron Man, I want to see them hovering, jumping, repulsing, and smashing in almost every scene they’re in. I feared that most of the movie would be quippy exposition scenes and we’d get maybe one action scene per story act. The lack of Hulk screentime in the earlier teasers slightly reinforced that fear, although, to be fair, you can’t expect teaser trailers to give away ALL the big surprises (or to even have all of the requisite FX done yet).

But I’m pleased to say that the extended “Avengers” Superbowl trailer… it’s as if writer/director Joss Whedon was speaking directly to me, telling me, “Dear lord, calm down, nerd boy. You’re worrying about nothing.”

“The Avengers” teaser was, easily, my favorite clip to come out of this year’s Superbowl. It just looks like fun. It’s everything that the “John Carter” trailer is not. Granted, that’s not entirely fair. The world at large already knows who Captain America and his pals are (thanks to decades of popularity and some big recent movies of their own), so we already have a connection to the characters. They don’t need to be introduced in the way that John Carter needs to be introduced. But, that being said, “The Avengers” teaser is littered with moments where I found myself either holding my breath, grinning like a madman, or rewinding the video, so I could slow it down frame by frame. This is a trailer that knows how to take something as overdone as the idea of “superhero movie” and repackage it in a way that really feels like something new.

The trailer does a very skillful job at balancing a lot of moving parts. It opens on a solemn note with Samuel L. Jackson telling us that the “world has changed” and that they’re “hopelessly outgunned”… which is perfect. If you’re going to assemble a murderer’s row of superheroes for one big adventure, the occasion SHOULD be dire and filled with pomp and circumstance. (Although that melodramatic tone is perhaps undercut by, one of my favorite parts of the trailer, the cute Asian extra in explicably wearing bunny ears that you can see running from explosions at the 0:05 second mark.) And then, after a series of establishing shots for the characters, Sam’s Nick Fury tells us “It’s time” and we suddenly get what we came for – big-time action and, most importantly, footage we haven’t seen before. And “The Avengers” team definitely delivered on both accounts.

We get a glimpse of Loki’s army of henchmen falling from the sky to wreck havoc in New York (theories are still swirling around the web regarding their true identity). We get shots of the team fighting TOGETHER, which is the whole reason the movie was made in the first place. We see Iron Man, not just flying, but fighting, and fighting hard. (His assent into the enemy forces at the 0:35 mark reminds me of the epic final flight sequence in Whedon’s “Serenity” for some reason.) We even get some unexpected treasures, like the shot of Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye lining up a shot while plunging off a building, which amazingly makes him look just as cool as the guys with actual superpowers. And the final “Avengers Assembling” moment at the 0:44 second mark… again, THAT shot is why the movie was made in the first place and it’s a beautiful little piece of iconography that just sells the movie as an experience in 3 seconds flat. And it’s even capped off with a pretty solid Tony Stark quip (reminding you that this is going to be a decidedly more cheeky experience than “Dark Knight Rises”) and the first really fantastic shot of the Hulk losing his mind on some enemy warplanes.

This is a teaser that actually knows how to tease and it’s a credit to “The Avengers” team that, in one minute of footage, they found a way to sum up the appeal of the movie without giving the whole thing away for free.

TRAILER OUTLOOK: Squeee. Seriously. That looks like so much more fun than trying to decipher what Tom Hardy is saying through a respirator mask for three hours.