New ‘Tomorrowland’ trailer offers more hints on Brad Bird’s SF secret

So here's a new trend I'm not fond of at all: making an audience “earn” a trailer debut.

At some point, studios stopped treating trailers as the device by which they advertise an event and started treating them like they were the actual event. Last week, they made people Tweet “#AvengersAssemble” if they wanted to see a new trailer for “Avengers: Age Of Ultron.” I have no doubt they were going to release the trailer no matter what, but by tying the trailer to the Tweeting, Marvel and Disney were able to suddenly manufacture this cultural moment.

Today, it's time for “Tomorrowland” to kick off the intense part of its campaign, selling the story and the characters to the public. While Disney is certainly thinking of this as a major branded effort, tied directly to their parks, this is at heart an original science-fiction film from director Brad Bird. This new trailer would suggest that once again, Bird has made a film about being exceptional and about being unafraid to be that way. In some ways, his films serve as a refutation to an entire generation of people that have been raised being told that everyone is special and everyone is amazing and everyone deserves the same accolades. Bird's films suggest the opposite is true. There are special people who have special talents, and those people should be allowed to be who they are, and those talents should be encouraged and celebrated, not homogenized.

I'm a big fan of the particular future that America imagined during the '60s. There is a beauty to that world that speaks to me. It looks like that world has come to life in Bird's film, and I'm really curious to see how all of the pieces we've glimpsed so far come together in the final film.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about the creepy bad guys who are just barely glimpsed in the new trailer, you might want to start with this video…

… or with this website. I suspect we'll see a lot more of that before the film opens.

“Tomorrowland” is in theaters May 22, 2015.

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