I feel bad for whoever directed this trailer, because it has everything going against it. It's a trailer for something, even worse it's a trailer for a video game, even worse it's a trailer for a violent video game, even worse it's a trailer for a survival horror video game, even worse the thing you're trying to survive is zombies.
Forget for a minute that this is a trailer for anything, and just think of it as a short film. Put it in that context, and judge it on that merit.
When I saw a link to this trailer yesterday I passed it over, because when you see "awesome game trailer!" it's like seeing "awesome Michael Bay trailer!" you kind of know what you're going to get. Then today I saw someone refer to it as art, and figured it was worth checking out. Like I said, judge this as a short film and it's amazing.
It doesn't make me want to play the game, you need a whole other preview to get me to do that. This trailer takes something we've become so overexposed to, zombie violence, and makes us look at it anew. Not that in its pieces it's anything groundbreaking. We've all heard sad piano and strings, we've all seen backwards slow motion used for tragic situations, we've all heard silence broken by chaos; but on the whole, this was something new.
I saw some comments compare it to the Gears of War ad with "Mad World" stirring in the background. That had all the trappings of melancholy, but was still using it to set the player up at the badass. There's nothing badass about the Dead Island trailer, and that's unique when zombie-anything runs on badassness these days. Often with zombie content we're shown a ravaged society of abandoned cars and run down buildings and meant to take that as tragedy. Tragedy that big can be incomprehensible though; it's why movies center on a small number of characters for a poignant death, because watching hundreds get gunned down just can't register the same way.
The Dead Island trailer has one death, and it's the first thing we see. It's not a shock or a twist, it's the inevitability that colors the rest of the piece. She's just too far away, the zombies are just too fast, her parents are just too slow. It's one death, but is far more relateable and tragic than seeing Atlanta abandoned in The Walking Dead.
Everything had to be well crafted for it to not seem cheap and cliched to show the happy family at the end. That's the progression though, or regression. We see the girl's last moments at the resort to begin and see her first moments there at the end. Jumbling the continuity isn't just stylish, it jumbles us and heightens us even as the tragedy moves in slow motion. The real payoff of moving backwards comes when the continuity intersects, as the moment the daughter is "rescued" becomes a moment of duality. Yes, we know he is reaching towards her and brings her inside the room and the image is merely moving backwards, but the reversal redefines that moment because the image is true as it is; in that moment he is losing her. That's powerful stuff for a commercial.
This game may end up being a huge disappointment, but whoever made this trailer has made a legitimate piece of art. They have created a 3 minute zombie movie more powerful than ones that last 2 hours, and I think that should be applauded.
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