10 Ways Trailers Let You Know A Movie Is Secretly Awful

5. Establishing Shots Overload

national treasure
Paramount
Notable offenders: National Treasure: Book Of Secrets, Fantastic Four, Survivor
Establishing shots are something of a necessary evil in filmmaking; a movie needs to set up a scene so the audience is aware of the spacial context in which it takes place, even though they're kinda visual filler akin to the descriptive waffle a first year creative writing student might use to pad out a short story.

Hollywood movies can be forgiven for following the formulaic use of establishing shots in their movies, but there's really no excuse when a short trailer - designed to sell a flim's best assets - litters it with countless establishing shots from start to finish. If there's one thing this suggests it's that decent shots of action are thin on the ground, and the trailer editor is trying to create a sense of scope and awe where it doesn't exist.

A prime example can be found in the recently released cinematic atrocity Fantastic Four (also known as Fant4stic - Se7en aside, be wary of titles which use numbers in this way), which features such cliched establishing shots as wheat fields, cityscapes and the Pentagon, the last of which surely counts among the most overused establishing shot in the history of Hollywood (followed closely by New York City, Big Ben and the London Eye). Although to be fair, when it came to Fantastic 4, an overload of establishing shots in the trailer was the least of Sony's concerns.

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Andrew Dilks hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.