Feature - Spoilerific 2 (Film Trailers)

Careful sweetie. Spoilers!

Okay - I accept that film and TV spoilers are the definition of First World Problems. I assure you at the outset that I am much more angry about political extremism, gender inequality and climate change denial. But still, spoilers... Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I made the point in my first article on the subject (click here) that no review can be truly spoiler-free. Even the most vague comments made by the reviewer are preempting the cinema experience on some level. I did promise, however, to go as light on plot developments in my own reviews as I possibly can. Imagine my irritation then on attending a film screening (to some extent for your benefit and edification, lovely blog-readers), when I am dumped upon by a succession of spoiler-heavy film trailers. 

Think about it. Yes the internet is a great seething swamp of spoilerific material (along with dubious political opinions, conspiracy nonsense and porn). But you can avoid it until you've viewed the entire Game of Thrones season or seen The Walking Dead through to its inevitably messy conclusion. No one is forcing you to read all that killjoy stuff. Likewise you can delete those naughty individuals from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, who drop spoilers unannounced into your feed. You can shut friends up mid-sentence by remonstrating 'No no no, don't tell me don't tell me don't tell me!' and making stern or beseeching gestures with your hands.

When you're stuck mid-cinema row, however, hemmed by with nacho and cola-laden fellow audience members, there's really nothing to be done. In such circumstances you're fundamentally screwed on a spoiler-avoidance level. It's a regular and disheartening experience, hence my now tired joke following some over-demonstrative film trail: 'Well, I don't have to go and see that one now'.

There's an art to the good trailer and some exponents of the trade seem to have mastered it. They succeed in being elusive, weaving together images from the movie out of sequence to provide its flavour while giving nothing essential away. The more mainstream the title, it seems, the less likely that this will be the case. To their credit the Star Wars people have it down; they know how to tantalise their fan-base without telling much of anything about the plot. However Marvel's recent Spiderman: Homecoming trailer pretty much laid out Peter Parker's entire character arc in the film. 

And there are worse offenders than that.

Brief case study - the 2015 film Brooklyn. Adapted from the novel by Colm Toibin, Brooklyn tells of Eilis, a young woman in 1950s Ireland, who is forced by circumstance to travel to Brooklyn, New York, in search of employment. There she is caught between her longing for home and the allure of a new, thriving city with all its romantic potential. 

What follows is a very enjoyable and poignant story about the conflict between your origins and where you want your life to go. That's all you really need to know plot-wise. But the people who made the trailer don't think so. God no. They think you're so stupid as an audience member that you need the entire story mapped out, before you could possibly be interested enough to watch the film. 

This is what the Brooklyn trailer reveals (If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, avoid the next paragraph. I'm venting here to enlist the sympathy of those who do know the story.):

Eilis meets and falls for a nice guy in Brooklyn and is happy. Their romance is going well. Then her mother speaks to her on the phone and asks her to come home after what is clearly a devastating family tragedy. She goes back and meets another equally nice guy in her native Ireland who she also likes. She's torn between two potential lovers, but which one will she choose? 

Now I've seen Brooklyn and all of that takes us in linear fashion within ten minutes of the film's ending. Yes there's lots of character nuance and dialogue and other stuff to enjoy, but hell's bells, plotwise that's the whole show! The trailer has left us with nothing except the final outcome, which we could probably guess anyway from the succession of shots included. Do the marketing team really think we need to know about a story's big third-act crisis, before we could possibly be interested in the story they're selling? What species of imbecile do they actually think we are?

Spoiler avoidance is a high-stakes game for those of us invested in film. (Not imminent thermonuclear warfare kind of high, I grant you, but in its own little way it still matters!) Options are limited. Perhaps your local cinema allows you to pre-select specific seats, in which case you can sneak in right before the film begins and avoid the trailers altogether. If you're not provided this luxury, however, and need to install yourself before the theatre fills up, then I can only suggest you demolish the contents of a super-sized popcorn bucket and place the newly emptied container over your head. (Or simply stick your fingers in your ears, avert your gaze and hum. I've actually been known to do this and I'm not ashamed.) 

The 21st Century is rife with extemism, injustice and steadily shrinking ice caps. And to crown it all, those ruddy tell-all trailers aren't going anywhere. World we live in, eh? One of spoilerific hell. I mean - is this really what we're leaving for our children?