Enter the Hype Machine

Bill Hicks was a funny guy. He had this one bit, went something like this:

"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising…kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I’m doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself. You have no rationalization for what you do, you are Satan’s littler helpers. Kill yourself."

An angry sentiment, yes, but anyone who’s gone to see a movie by M. Night Shyamalamadingdong understands. Or, you know, people who went to see Prometheus. Man, that was a new classic, wasn’t it? Okay, maybe not.  But you have to give it to 20^th Century Fox; that was a hell of an advertising campaign. I’m pretty sure that for the entirety of spring 2012 there wasn’t a single day I wasn’t bombarded with trailers, viral clips, and countdowns for trailers for Scott’s would-be sci-fi magnum opus. They just kept coming. If I wasn’t watching cocky robo Fassbender bragging to me that anything I could do he could do better, I was watching Idris Elba pilot some funky quadruped version of Serenity as a prelude to that god-awful Inception inspired BOM-BOM racket that’s been prevalent in every damn trailer since 2010. 

Prometheus’s trailers were interesting in that they appealed to both your average cinema-goer, with stunning visual effects and the BOM-BOM. But several of those adverts also appealed to snobby cinema aficionados like myself by referencing the original Alien trailer with neat font tricks and sound effects:

                                                                                               

I was one of those cinema enthusiasts giggling with delight when I caught the references to the Alien trailer. I posted the link to the trailer on my Facebook and did my part contributing to the hype machine. I also began to push my anticipation into overdrive for what I thought was going to be an Alien prequel. Several days before the movie debuted, Scott was quoted as saying, “For all intents and purposes this [Prometheus] is very loosely a prequel, very.” It was too late, though. Even the director himself trying to let me down softly couldn’t damper my hopes for a proper Alien installment, which, again, is what I took the advertising for the movie to be suggesting.

Prometheus was something very different from what I had expected. There weren’t that many scares or obvious connections to the Xenomorph mythos or phallic aliens bursting forth from chest cavities, showering the cast in specs of flesh and rib cage. Disappointed? A tad. It was still a pretty good movie even though the story was a mess and it was a little too content to stir about in its own ambiguity and dumb, extraneous characters and...it was a good movie.  I think. 

Lots of people didn’t share the same perspective and were quite adamant about their disappointment at not getting their Alien prequel or, at the very least, a movie worthy of standing beside Scott’s  two other sci-fi  masterpieces. Shortly after the film debuted, bloggers and writers all over the net started branding the flick a disappointment and a victim of its own hype because that’s what writers do; we bitch, we whine, we spew hyperbole, mix metaphors, and do all sorts of war crime worthy things to punctuation and the English language.

We’re good at that. 

But let’s take a step back for a second and just examine the situation as objectively as possible. This surely isn’t the first time moviegoers have been wound up by a film’s advertising only to find out that the final product doesn’t come close to matching their expectations. How about The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s tepid adaptation of Alice Sebold’s moving novel? Or Cloverfield?  How many times a year are movie lovers tricked into having inflated expectations by a cunning mixture of trailers, posters, and viral web videos? How often have you left a theater and thought to yourself “well, that was nothing like the trailer.” Too many times, right? We should probably do something about that. 

An honest trailer for Cloverfield would have bragged about its 85 minutes of non-stop motion sickness. Wonder why they didn't do that.

The answer is simple: kill all the advertisers.

Or not. I guess that plan is rather impractical. Okay, okay, how about this? We start trying to temper our expectations, which, I know, is an incredibly difficult thing to do. But just think about Prometheus from 20^th Century Fox’s standpoint for a moment. According to figures listed by The Hollywood Reporter, Prometheus’s budget was between “$120 million and $130 million.” The producers have to recoup that money at the very least and, ideally, make a nice profit off the investment. Frankly, they probably couldn’t give two shits about whether or not their advertising campaign was an accurate representation of the movie itself.  That’s not the goal of advertising a major motion picture. 

My point isn’t that you should have sympathy for 20^th Century Fox for initiating the hype machine for action-packed summer blockbuster OR the hip, soulful indie drama to such lofty heights.  Yes, the blame for crafting deceptive trailers and starting up that machine lies at the feet of a film’s producers. But whether or not you fall for those deceptive practices is all on you, the cinema-goer. Don’t like it? You could always abstain from going to the movies on the pessimistic assumption that every single movie with a kick-ass trailer is going to suck. Or you could do the research.  Why not combat misleading movie trailers by taking the time to read reviews? And I don’t mean skim user reviews on IMDB.  Actually find a critic or a blogger or someone who has written about movies you’re interested in and has, more or less, the same level of enthusiasm for those movies and start keeping up with their reviews. I read Peter Travers and Roger Ebert and usually find myself in agreement with their sentiments or at least understand their perspectives. I also often have a murky idea of what a particular cinematic experience is going to be but not enough to spoil it if I’m intrigued by the film.

I’m not saying that all of this is true for all movies. Some movies, particularly movies based on popular intellectual properties, live beyond their advertising and have certain expectations that go alongside that property. For example, you expect a Batman movie to have a somewhat gothic aesthetic, have adrenaline pumping action, and star a man who dresses up in a batsuit and fights crime. These are givens.

This is not a given.

Sometimes these movies fail to meet the watcher’s expectations regardless of the advertising, like Superman Returns, a movie that Kevin Smith summed up best as “the art house version of Superman, the whiny, emo Superman movie.”  Superman Returns is a boring film that is a bit too concerned with exploring Superman’s emotional toils and woes. Those aren’t bad areas to present to the viewer, per se, but when that character happens to be Superman—the guy who flies around and burns structures to ashes with his eye beams—you should probably strike a balance between those scenes of awkward silence where Clark Kent stares longingly at Lois Lane and scenes with Supes showcasing what makes him Superman (e.g., punching things). It’s kind of a bummer when the most exciting event in a Superman flick is Superman’s kid unexpectedly crushing Lex Luthor's henchman with a piano.

Granted, Superman Returns is better than Superman III, but that’s not saying much.

 It’s kind of like arguing Waterworld is better than The Postman and is a slightly better movie because of it. (It isn’t.)

Should the folks who cobble together these trailers and viral videos strive to give an accurate representation of the movies they’re trying to sell—if such a goal is hypothetically possible? Maybe in an ideal world. But in a society where money is the crux of everything, you’re probably better off accepting that the hype machine isn’t going away.

Now, you do have a choice whether or not you choose to support that machine and take part in keeping it running. Love the trailer for Avatar 2: The Return of Stephen Lang’s Jawline? Remember it’s just a trailer and then consciously mull over whether you’ll post it to Facebook or Twitter or forward it to your friends. Don't let it be a  knee-jerk response.

Don’t like being disappointed by films that had extravagant advertising? Just remember that when TV spots and viral videos for hot releases like Pacific Rim or Star Trek: into the Darkness begin to bombard you. Then decide if your anti-advertising stance is enough to keep you from giving money to the filmmakers. To be honest, such extremism seems kind of pointless but hey, enjoy your sense of moral superiority. I'll be over here in the theater, armed with a box of Nerds and somewhat tempered expectations as Lincoln begins.

NEXT: Wayne Spencer writes about snobbish hostility in geek culture.