Trailer Analysis: Man of Steel gets a cryptic and real-world teaser from of the Batman Begins school of marketing.

Old news, for sure, but I was on vacation last weekend and then returned home to find my son had a stomach bug (he's fine now, natch), so I'm only now getting around to this teaser (and a couple other trailers of note.  As you all surely know by now, Warner Bros. released two teasers attached to The Dark Knight Rises this weekend, one with voice-over provided by Pa Kent (Kevin Costner) and the other by Jor-El (Russell Crowe).  While the intitial response was that Zack Snyder is basically making Terrence Malick's Superman: The Movie, the truth is that this initial teaser is merely emulating the play book of Batman Begins. Please watch the first teaser for Batman Begins after the jump and then we'll continue.

Scott Mendelson

Okay, see what Warner Bros. did there?  They crafted a completely real-world character-centric drama without a hint of Batman right until the end, establishing that Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins would be a completely real-world drama that just happened to tell a Batman origin story.  Same gimmick here, with a troubled young man attempting to find himself after growing up on a farm and then working on a fishing boat. Only at the last moment do they drop the facade and reveal that we're actually watching a teaser for a Superman film.  It's a fine, moody teaser, even if Warner Bros. made a crucial mistake of using music that most geeks/nerds will recognize immediately, that being the 'Gandolf dies' clip from Fellowship of the Ring.  But aside from that, it's a powerful teaser that both separates this film from the other interpretations while assuring fans that this won't be a traditional Zack Snyder film, instead hewing closer to the character realism of Dawn of the Dead versus the more stylistic fantasy of 300 or Sucker Punch.  The only problem with the teaser is that it pales in comparison to the emotional power of the Comic-Con footage, which is a minute longer, has more Superman shots, and is perfectly set to music from The Thin Red Line (which is more famously known as 'the Pearl Harbor trailer music').  I was lucky to see a decent bootleg of the footage and it is devestatingly powerful and I can only hope that Warner Bros. just releases *that* as the next trailer come December (most likely attacked to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey).  But anyway, what did you think of the Man of Steel teasers?  And if you were lucky enough to see the Comic Con stuff, what did you think of that?  Man of Steel opens June 14th, 2013.  As always we'll see.