Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – Trailer v Trailer

Movie trailer roll outs are perhaps among the most reflexive kind of advertisement campaigns, especially when the internet as a whole has taken ownership of a movie before a single production shot ever hit the web. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice belongs to everyone and none. Warner Brothers is trying to spread the love. Here’s the trailer debuted this week at Comic-Con.

Here’s the initial, public reveal trailer from April of this year.

The difference? Time, internet opinions and characters that don’t brood for a living, all compounding to a tone just a smidgen closer to the average blockbuster. When that first trailer hit the web, the reactions were mixed at best. Grim/Dark was the term being thrown around at the time. Zack Snyder’s direction seemed to have taken a bit more of a stylized turn from Man of Steel, but his predilection for smoke, rain and two men staring each other down certainly hadn’t faded. Then, Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne/Batman seemed, more than ever, to want to put his boot in every child’s face. This time around he’s hugging children.

Before, Henry Cavill’s Superman/Clark Kent hovered and glistened as only his demi-God form. It was static. This time, he’s got lines as a human being and glistens in a Senate hearing, in addition to all the obvious places – the sky, wreckage, etc. Cavill never delivered a line that didn’t insist you look at his jaw line. At least here he’s delivering lines that don’t depend on it.

And then there are these two.

That’s Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman who, in spite of obviously dire circumstances, actually takes a moment of levity in the middle of battle. She is, after all, sort of a god, and it seems like this version of the character is a little more wary than our youthful Man of Steel.

Ever so controversial, Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor spins the tone of the new trailer ever so gently in a zanier direction. There’s even a hint of Joker madness in the way he taunts and ponders his schemes. Eisenberg may not look the part or even sound the part, but he’s embracing it valiantly as his own thing.

Compare all this to the initial trailer, and you’ve got a movie instead of an angst-addled painting. Now matter how dark it gets or seems anymore, the tangibility of a plot, including real character motivation for Bruce Wayne himself, has the same critics of the first trailer putting exclamation points in their headlines today. Of course, we can’t go a single trailer without some of that Snyder erotica:

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