trailer mix

Is This the Most Underwhelming Trailer of the Year?

It should be easy to sell us on the movie Red Lights: The movie has an interesting cast (which includes Robert De Niro, Sigourney Weaver, Cillian Murphy, and buzzed-about newcomer Elizabeth Olsen), a promising director (Buried’s Rodrigo Cortés), and an intriguing plot that has De Niro’s world-famous psychic on the verge of being exposed as a fraud. Somehow, though, the Red Lights teaser managed to avoid all those potential hooks! Instead, it’s an almost perverse experiment in how you can manage to draw out nothing — and we mean nothing — for one minute and twelve seconds. This is a movie that should probably tell us what it is and what it’s about, but instead, it asks you to thrill to the idea that Robert De Niro is slowly turning his head and culminates with an over-the-top title reveal that might work if this were The Dark Knight Rises, but doesn’t quite have the same effect for the vague title of a movie you haven’t heard of about who-the-hell-knows-what. We are now weirdly excited for the full-length trailer. Show us less! Less!

Is This the Most Underwhelming Trailer of the Year?