In the trailer bin of late:
- If Super 8 didn’t fill your quota of Spielbergian schmaltz for the month, check out the workings of the master himself in the first trailer for Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, with Emily Watson, David Thewlis, Peter Mullan, Niels Arestrup, Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irvine, Benedict Cumberbatch and Toby Kebbell. Er…ok. I hear good things about the play, and granted I’m more of a sucker for Old Yeller than a Black Beauty type, but this doesn’t look all that interesting to me. Bring on Lincoln already — which, by the way, just added David Strathairn as William Seward to its already impressive cast.
- Tom Cruise is on the run (again) and looking to pass the baton to Jeremy Renner in the new trailer for Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, also with Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Josh Holloway, Lea Seydoux, Ving Rhames, Anil Kapoor, and Michael Nyqvist. Well, at the very least, it doesn’t have to be very good to be better than the last two.
- It’s not just Transformers up there: Another super-secret NASA expedition to the moon — circa the eventful month of December 1974 — goes awry in the trailer for Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego’s found-footage horror movie Apollo 18. A promising idea, but I’m not sold on the execution — I’ll probably wait for Netflix on this one.
- And, in the most promising of the lot, Gary Oldman takes up the mantle of Alec Guinness as George Smiley in the teaser for Tomas Alfredson’s period remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, also with Colin Firth, John Hurt, Ciaran Hinds, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Stephen Graham, Simon McBurney, and Benedict Cumberbatch. Wow, that is a murderer’s row, and no mistake.
If I was in the business of buying stock in young actors with a promising future, I’d be building my portfolio around Benedict Cumberbatch.