Comments on: Official Eclipse Trailer: For the Boys

By: Official Twilight Merchandise

Official Twilight Merchandise — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 05:31:01 +0000

I’ve seen a much larger reaction in males with the most recent Eclipse preview. The action, violence and “battle” scenes seem to be much more interesting than the first two films which were filled with love scenes throughout the movie. This movie should reach a much broader audience, including males I would suspect. Either way, females will still be dragging their boyfriends and husbands to the theaters.

By: Lawson

Lawson — Sun, 23 May 2010 01:17:15 +0000

Some pretty dodgey gender assumptions going on here; your argument amounts to ‘romance and melodrama is for young women; Summit should target them’ – is this the sort of thing we should be privileging for these audiences? Is Bella not a fairly poor, passive female character for young women to identify with? I’m not sure we should be championing either side of this franchise’s gender strategies.

By: Will

Will — Sat, 22 May 2010 16:30:20 +0000

Thanks for this really interesting piece. What the trailer reminds me of most (apart from, confirming your point, The Dark Knight crossed with The Two Towers) is the campaign for 2002’s Attack of the Clones.

If memory serves, the second episode in the Star Wars prequel trilogy was promoted with a variety of trailers, including one called “Mystery” and one called “Romance”. Readers with the DVD to hand can check on this.

Personal position: I’m a straight man who hasn’t got round to reading the books, liked Twilight the movie a lot more than I expected to, and genuinely liked New Moon; so I’m looking forward to the third instalment without knowing much about the plot.

The Eclipse trailer strikes me, at first glance, as compiling pretty much every line of bad-ass dialogue and reference to war, armies or killing, returning multiple times to the same scenes of werewolf combat, pulling together every shot that signals “action movie”, tinting it all steely blue and chopping it all up to a Batman drumbeat.

That is, my suspicion from my naive position of knowing very little about the plot is that this trailer is spinning a teen love triangle into a war film, and that you could very easily create another entirely different (and possibly more accurate) trailer from the same movie — along the lines of those fan-made “The Shining as Romantic Comedy” and “Scary Mary Poppins” pastiches on YouTube.

Having said that, I’m actually even more keen to see Eclipse now, so I’ve been successfully played.