Non-stop spoilers and teaser promos are big hits in the blogosphere. But where does the excitement stop and the advertising start?
The internet has turned film fans into drooling junkies, trawling the ether for ten second snippets of yet-to-be-released pictures. It happened in the run-up to The Dark Knight. It's happening with Catherine Hardwicke's adaptation of vamp saga Twilight and the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, both of which are out at the end of the year. And it's already brewing with Terminator: Salvation, which isn't due out until spring 2009.
Setting aside the question of whether the dystopic franchise has already been destroyed thanks to the travesty of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and the wanton act of vandalism that was The Sarah Connor Chronicles,
what do teaser trailers do for the audience? At best, they indulge us with an intriguing line or a spicy plot hint. At worst, they are like that Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince. It promises to be the bleakest adaptation so far (although I bet they still won't touch Harry's Draco fixation); therefore we get a clip so literally dark that there are no strong images at all, just a black screen, one line of dialogue and the title rendered in silver-grey. Thrilling.
In the case of Terminator: Salvation there's a shaky montage of tepid shots that have long passed into the mythology of the series: the human skull being crushed by the symbolic machine foot, the vibe of military-industrial paranoia, the hulking silhouette of a human-detecting machine rising above the horizon.
Nearly every one of these shots could have been created from outtakes of the previous films and the TV series. The trailer becomes nothing more than the harbinger of yet another degradation of what was once a daring, feminist, technologically-apt marvel. It must be said that science fiction and fantasy fans, being tech-minded, are already very net-friendly and therefore susceptible to the lure of teasers and spoilers.
They've been living out their video-streaming, info-sharing, virtual reality-occupying, bitmapped, multidimensional avatar personality fantasies since the earliest days of cyberpunk theory and role-playing Amstrad games.
It's only a short step from reading a blog to finding yourself awake at four in the morning, watching Smallville fan videos on YouTube. The internet makes it easy for fans to isolate and magnify their obsessions.Getting stuck into a Buffy or Battlestar Galactica forum can make you feel as though that's the only thing which exists. Your obsession is shared and encouraged by others, a parallel dimension unfolding in realtime; you all experience the same group delusion. If you're a fantasy fan, these urgent narratives (whether technologically flavoured or not) have a conceptual, allegoric density which flimsy real life just can't provide.
Producers know this. Sure, it's nice of them to go onto the net, feed us a few crumbs from the cutting room floor and scour the message boards to tailor their work to our dorky requirements. But this isn't about narrative integrity, it's about money.
Imagine millions of people speculating feverishly over some deliberately unrevealing footage of some cruel but cool robot killing machines from the future. When the film actually comes out they'll be so keyed up that they'll race to the cinema on the opening weekend. And however much I complain, however rubbish I know Terminator: Salvation will be, come spring 2009 I'll be first in line.
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