Both Man of Steel, the Superman movie franchise reboot, and Star Trek released their third and possibly final full-length trailers. As a die-hard fan of both Superman and Star Trek, I cannot help but notice that these trailers present very divergent understandings of their respective source material. I look at both these trailers and think that both are visual feasts, but only the Man of Steel trailer gets the essence of the source material, while JJ Abrams’s Star Trek Into Darkness trailer highlights action and adventure, but precious little else to distinguish it from any other large-scale space opera.
While Star Trek has almost always been full of action and adventure, the Abrams reboot of the Star Trek franchise appears to want nothing to do with the cerebral, contemplative aspects that undergirded the television series as well as the movies starring the original cast. As a master of showmanship, Abrams has had the fanboys and girls buzzing about Benedict Cumberbatch’s “John Harrison”—is he actually John Harrison, or is he playing some other re-imagined villain from Trek lore?
What we do know—and what this latest trailer reinforces—is that Harrison has some kind of mad-on about Starfleet, to the point that he is going to cause massive destruction. And I do mean massive. Instead of lens flares, Abrams will give us unending explosions. Everything’s blowing up, and exploding, and falling out of the sky, and growling that “Your world is not safe,” but I don’t know what makes this Star Trek. Sure, it’s great spectacle—the visuals from the trailer are gorgeous and I’m a sucker for Federation starships firing phasers and photon torpedoes, but I’m also a sucker for Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy and Scotty, Uhura, Chekhov, and Sulu boldly going to other worlds and seeking out and finding new lifeforms and new civilizations. Or, as Q pointed out to Captain Picard, charting the possibilities of human existence. That is what makes Star Trek different from other science fiction franchises and appears to be sorely lacking in all of the promotion of Into Darkness.
And then there’s the new trailer for the Superman reboot. Fanboys and girls have been fairly anxious about Man of Steel, especially after Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns failed to become a super-blockbuster. Oh, sure, it did respectable box office, but too many people thought it was a slavish remake of Superman: The Movie, or that the movie was too somnolent, or that Brandon Routh was just plain dull as Superman/Clark Kent, or that there simply wasn’t enough action in the movie.
Well, not so with Man of Steel, if this final full trailer is any indication. Oh, yes, there will be explosions—lots of them, and there will be massive destruction. However, this trailer shows that while this movie will be a retelling of Superman’s origins and will have a villain we’ve seen before in the form of General Zod, this will be its own movie without sacrificing things that we know are necessary for a Superman movie to be faithful to the Superman mythos. Superman may be more angsty than in the Richard Donner movies, but he retains his altruism and isn’t stalking an engaged and miscast Lois Lane. Krypton may be re-imagined to be a futuristic medieval planet, but it is still doomed, and Kal-El is sent to Earth to be raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent. There are tweaks and changes here and there—most notably the hint that Lois Lane has been on Kal-El’s trail for a while and will meet Superman before Clark Kent starts working at the Daily Planet…assuming that Clark will even work at the Planet in these movies.
While the Star Trek trailer has lowered my expectations for Into Darkness, the latest Man of Steel trailer has raised my expectations and has allayed my reservations about this reboot. The images in this trailer are flashy, but they show promising and exciting balance between the super and the man. If the final product is anything like the trailer, Man of Steel may just raise the bar for science fiction/superhero movies.
