Star Wars trailer reactions, Fantastic Four poster, and Zathura trailer

Fantastic Four Poster
Originally uploaded by waggy182.

Lots of stuff to talk about today, so let's get started.

Star Wars: Hopefully everyone caught the Star Wars trailer on thursday night. If you missed it, you can view it through a couple of links here. It's funny the way I went through the series of emotions during this trailer that I've had about the first two prequels so far, albeit in a different order. The first minute or so is the boring politics and bad dialogue that has been the prequel trilogy's biggest criticism so far. I remember thinking "Wow did they drop the ball on this one". Then the action starts.... HOLY CRAP, this movie is gonna be ridiculous. There were SO many cool shots in the montage that takes up pretty much the whole second half of the trailer (some of which I actually considered to be significant spoiler material, so consider yourselves warned). Then we come to the "money shot". That final image of Darth Vader and the emperor.... Wow, I'm speechless. If the movie itself gets me excited the way the latter half of this preview did, then I'd definitely have to take back all the harsh comments I've made about George Lucas over the last few years (well, most of them at least).

Fantastic Four: The new Fantastic Four one-sheet (or poster for non-movie geeks) is pictured above. Click it for a larger version. Pretty cool shot. Basically the same poster that we saw before except they added some "power" effects. I still haven't been really wowed by anything I've seen from this one, which really disappoints me because I am a huge fan of the Fantastic Four comics. Right now I'm just hoping this turns out to be one of those movies that completely blows away expectations, like 2000's X-Men did.

Zathura: I'm sure very few people reading this have heard of this movie. It's a new sci-fi/fantasy picture from Jon Favreau, who directed Elf. He also wrote and starred in one of my favorite movies, Swingers which brought the world Vince Vaughn (trust me, it's money). The teaser trailer was just released and can be viewed here. You don't see too much here, but I liked what I saw. If the premise seems a little like Jumanji, that's not a coincidence. It's based on a novel from the same author. This looks like it could be a really fun kids' movie that adults could enjoy too, much like Elf was.