10 Classic Film Trailers That Show Us How It's Done

2. WarGames

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAcEzhQ7oqA This is one of my favorite trailers; it stands as one of the best of the best for me. One of the things that I really love about this trailer is where it places its emphasis. Obviously, a film like WarGames, with its plot leaning heavily on computer hacking and military technology, could have had an effects-laden trailer, full of nothing but computer graphics, guided missiles, and tons and tons of soldiers. Of course, all of those things are essential to a film like this one, and this trailer, appropriately, has some of all of the above, but good effects do not a movie make. What does make a good movie are elements that have been around since the beginning of storytelling and really since the dawn of time. Those elements are a strong, compelling story and life-like, identifiable characters. The marketers of WarGames demonstrate that they understand the importance of those basic elements by placing at the trailer€™s forefront the film€™s main character. Computer hackers, as they are usually depicted in films, are, at the very least, characters that are difficult for a typical person to relate to, or, at the very worst, overly angry people who are very hard to like (Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network is a prime example of the latter). The WarGames trailer shows us right off that David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) is not our typical movie hacker. The marketers give us a brief moment showing us that Lightman can be witty and then give us another scene, showing us that, like any typical teenage guy, he€™s interested in any cute girl who happens to cross his path. The trailer also manages to weave the hacking in among the latter element of Lightman€™s character, showing us that his hacking skill gives him an edge with the ladies that other guys don€™t have. After showing us that David Lightman is just an average, typical guy, the trailer moves on to the next essential element, that of story. The trailer gives us the basic idea of the flick, said idea being that of a young hacker accidentally breaking into NORAD€™s defense planning system. The trailer tells us about this in a series of vivid images of computer graphics, room-filling supercomputers, war-tactics maps and a lot of panicked-looking military men and women. As the trailer goes on, the cuts come more quickly and the music grows louder, causing a sense of unease and an ever-larger-growing situation as we see this red-blooded American teenager being arrested for espionage. And of course, like most great trailers, this one ends with one final line, one that sums up the whole essence of the movie, leaving the audience thinking and wanting to hear the rest of the story. The line in this trailer? €œIs this a game or is it real?€