Like last year’s trailer for Cloverfield or even the teaser for The Matrix, the first spot for Eagle Eye was a brilliant bit of teasing, tantalizing audiences by saying just enough about the plot to reel them in without spoiling any of the movie’s secrets. The Eagle Eye teaser does little more than establish the characters and set up the film’s premise, but that’s enough. Reviews for the film convinced me to stay away, but really, how could it possibly live up to this?



How do you boil down a four and a half hour movie about Che Guevara into a 2-minute trailer? If you’re Steven Soderbergh, you start by appealing to the Che mythos through some interview footage, intercut with scenes of him triumphing in battle and making his philosophies on revolution clear at the United Nations. Then, without warning, you switch gears into Che’s fateful final years, in which his success began to dry up, and even change aspect ratios accordingly. The Che teaser is nothing flashy, but it gets the job done extremely well, boiling down the film’s trajectory while leaving interesting moviegoers wanting more.



Roland Emmerich has become Hollywood’s reigning master of disaster largely by inventing increasingly bizarre ways to besiege the people of Earth. With his latest he imagines that the titular date, the year in which the Mayan calendar has foretold the world to end, as the time of many and varied apocalyptic disasters. But for anyone who thinks Emmerich doesn’t realize how absurd his stories are, I give you this trailer, in which he visualizes a Tibetan monastery being washed away by a massive tidal wave. For that final touch, he sets it to Wendy Carlos’ music from The Shining, just to show you he knows what he’s doing. 2012 could very well suck, but you know I’ll be there opening weekend.



Finally, I probably watched the red-band trailer for Pineapple Express more times than any other trailer this year. What can I say? It’s a blast, even if it does spoil many of the best laughs in the movie.