This post was lifted directly from my blogger account, so excuse the formatting issues…
There’s a lot of furore over this, opinions range from ”OMG…BEST TRAILER EVERZZZZ” and “It made me cry tears made from cola and cheetos” to “it’s in poor taste” and ”just because it’s slow motion and in reverse doesn’t make it good”.
There are plenty of intelligent arguments (although there are many more unintelligent) either side of the fence, and most of them focus on either how hard hitting, or completely unnecessary, it was to show a young girl’s final moments before turning into a flesh eating zombie. It is nowhere near a pleasant sight, which isn’t to say it’s not good, you could even argue the fact that purely because some viewers felt sad, unhappy and downbeat after watching it means it’s actually ‘good’. It’s the way in which it makes the viewer feel that emotional response that makes it an interesting trailer, however I don’t fully agree with the way in which it went about it.
Ultimately I think using a young girl to get the player feeling those emotions is in poor taste. There are plenty of other ways in which the same scene could have been shown, but with a little more intelligence.
The trailer is basically telling the viewer what to think “It’s a young girl, she’s dead…she fell out of the window after eating her family…FEEL SAD YOU MORON!”.
“Oh look, she’ trying to run away, but you already know what happens…THERE’S NO HOPE FOR HER…”
It’s all well and good, but it would have been nice if they had turned off the caps-lock.
The closing frames really go for the jugular, showing the young girl enjoying a family holiday, posing for holiday photos that they will remember forever….
I did feel those ‘required’ emotions that the trailer set out to do, but it didn’t make me feel good about it. I’d have liked to have seen more more of an emphasis on how this was affecting the mother and father. The same emotions would have been felt, but we wouldn’t have felt that we were forced into them, purely because it’s how we ‘should’ react.
The best shot in the entire trailer is when the mother looks over at the bed and sees her daughter getting up, only to realise she’s actually a zombie. It’s a great moment, but it’s the only part that actually shows how the family feels about this tragic event.
Rather than have the trailer scream directly at me how I should be feeling, I’d rather make up my own decisions based on the emotions of the people on the screen, after all, that’s what we’ve been striving to achieve all these years, right?
I’d love to know what people think about the trailer, so feel free to comment…
therussmorris posted this
