(Note: the following article was first published at The Last Ditch in December of 2009, but I think readers will agree that the phenomenon it describes still predominates.... only the names have changed.)
I see a lot of movies, but not as many as I used to see. With age has come discernment. I'm able to tell a lot of things from previews, and thus save myself the trouble of wasting two hours of my life on something that looks dull, unappealing, or annoying.
Previews rarely lie, at least not in one sense. If a preview for a movie looks bad, the movie itself is almost certainly bad too. (The rule doesn't always work in reverse, however; I have seen many previews that prove to be much more entertaining than the movies they're promoting.)
One thing easy to glean from a preview is whether a movie is formulaic. Clichéd plots or story arcs are commonly decried by professional and amateur movie critics: "Oh, another buddy movie; another chick flick; another historical costume epic ..." However, certain narrative clichés are rarely noticed, much less discussed, because we take them to be lively and profound truths instead of tired and superficial formulae. We don't recognize them as propaganda because we've internalized their messages to such a degree that they seem to us self-evident. To understand them objectively would require deprogramming; we would almost need to have a certain computer chip removed from our brains to see things properly. But that chip is wedged in tight; removing it would be painful. Moreover, if we go through with the surgery, and it's taken out, we realize that the brainwashed zombies who still have chips in their heads are going to castigate us as the true freaks.
