Jon Wick Trailer Analysis Essay

Movie trailers cannot be viewed as just bits and pieces of a feature-length presentation. Nor should one think of trailers as simply promotional advertisements. All movies belong and can be categorized by genre(s) – Westerns, independents, sci-fi, hybrids. We can situate a movie trailer into the same genre as the movie the trailer promotes. For example, one could study the new trailer for Jon Wick and examine the noticeable genre conventions and without seeing the film, one can tell Wick is very much a part of the “wronged man,” revenge genre. Certainly there is enough evidence in the Jon Wick trailer to place it in the tradition of movies like Man on Fire and Taken. But instead of simply viewing a trailer as an extension of the film and part …show more content…
The promotional appeal of a film as a whole rests heavily on familiarity, the lure and comfort of the known. A familiar setting is a place where audiences want to go again and again, whether by reviewing favorite films with those settings or by revisiting such a place via a new film that is of the same type. The most obvious way many trailers evoke similar stories and settings is through iconography. Another pervasive trailer convention often marshalled for the rhetoric of genre is repetition. Frequent repetition within narration, titles and visual motifs connotes both sameness−the again and again aspect of a trailer. Repetition generates rhythm and rhythm is an important structural feature of a trailer’s sensory appeal. The rhetoric of a trailer also deals with assumptions trailers make about what kind of experiences audiences want to watch and what kinds of experiences they desire to gain at the movies. In trailers, the narrative is often promoted through a film’s characterizations. These appeals to interest in the characters draw audiences to films on the basis of identification with the characters. Audiences are invited to identify with the character’s situation or motivation and to want to participate or share in the film’s resolution. The first person to show up in Fifty Shades of Grey trailer is Ana Steele, …show more content…
One shot in a trailer can stand in for a number of narrative elements, and those brief images become charged with significance. Trailers offer overblown fragments from the film so as to make audiences piece the film together in their minds, using their own imaginations in order to fully grasp the trailer. This filling-in of the unseen parts of the movie allows the audience to create the film they hope and want to see. Since the purpose of the trailer is to attract an audience to the film, these excerpts are usually drawn from the most exciting, funny, or otherwise noteworthy parts of the movie but usually without producing