Yep, It's True: You Can Review a Movie Based Solely on Its Trailer

by Eric D. Snider Mar 27th 2008 // 2:32PM

Filed under: Drama, Trailers and Clips

One of the unwritten rules of movie reviewing used to be that if it was in the film's trailer, you could mention it in the review without it being considered a "spoiler." But in the last few years, we've learned that you can't follow that rule in every case, because too many trailers reveal too much. It's totally backwards, but movie critics now find themselves having to be more careful about giving things away than the studios are.

Christopher Orr, film critic at the politics-and-arts magazine The New Republic, has gotten tired of trailers that tell the whole story. So as an experiment, his review of 21 (in theaters tomorrow) is based only on his viewing of the trailer -- he hasn't actually seen the movie. He's betting that the trailer tells him everything he needs to know (except for the characters' names, which he got from IMDb). After he sees the film, he'll update the "review" as necessary.
Now, here's the funny part. I have seen 21 (here's my review from SXSW), and Orr's review is shockingly accurate. I read it expecting to find that he had jumped to one or two conclusions, based on the trailer, that aren't really true of the movie as a whole. But nope: There's nothing in his "(p)review" that needs to be corrected. He even picks up on some of the minor, nit-picky (but annoying) details about the film, such as how the card-counting group's "secret" hand signals are "as subtle as semaphore."

So let's discuss. Which trailers do you think gave too much away? My go-to example is the trailer for Cast Away, which revealed (spoiler alert) that the main character does, in fact, get off the island. What about you? Which trailers were the worst offenders? And does it matter? Have you ever decided not to see a movie solely because the trailer had revealed too much? Or do you see the movie anyway?

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