If you dare, sit through these back to back to back:
Ten years of mainstream cinema, from 1996 to 2006. All three are crappy movies, but again, I want to concentrate on the trailers. Can you tell them apart? Two feature raging clouds behind the WB shield, all feature quick cuts of the actors while telling us nothing about their characters, all suggest a vague premise rather than a story worth telling.
Mostly, all three simply feature meaningless sensation. Clouds, wind, water, screaming, crashing, smashing, WHOOSH, WUMP, AAIIEE! To what purpose?
These three movies are linked by their use of natural disasters, but are otherwise dissimilar. Twister is designed as boilerplate Big Dumb Entertainment. A Perfect Storm has a true, interesting story to tell about real human beings caught up in forces beyond their comprehension. (It botches the job, but that's not the point.) Poseidon is a knowingly campy throwback to seventies disaster epics.
Yet in their trailer, they're all the same movie. This is one of the reasons I actually dread going out to the movies these days. Depending on the theater chain (I'm talking to you, Carmike Cinemas), you can sit through a full half hour of previews before the movie you've come to see. When they're all like this, the same thing over and over, it becomes punishing, and worse, depressing. Any sentient being enduring this merely longs for escape.
