Looks like I'm seeing Thor: The Dark World

If there was any Marvel movie I was pretty sure I never needed to see, it would have been Thor: The Dark World.

I didn't much care for the first Thor movie -- it was fine, but nothing more. The second never became a priority, and it landed with Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 as the only MCU movies I (so far) haven't seen.

I'll probably watch Guardians before the end of the year, and now it looks like Iron Man 3 may be hanging out by its lonesome in this group. Because Thor: Ragnarok looks so damn awesome that I think I'll need to do it the courtesy of watching its predecessor before I see it.

Truth is, the involvement of Taika Waititi probably meant I'd be seeing Ragnarok anyway, but watching the trailer last night just amped up my excitement level for it from, well, basically non-existent to almost uncontrollable.

And sure, you could just say that any trailer cut to Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" is going to be awesome almost no matter what the accompanying images are. But in this case, the accompanying images are fantastic. The very outer-spacey Ragnarok looks exactly like what I've wanted the Guardians movies to be, and which at least half of them haven't been -- an outer space-set comic book movie that is actually pretty badass. (Sorry, Green Lantern, you don't qualify.)

I'm not sure I even remember half of what I thought was so great about this trailer, but that's probably better, as it'll remain fresh for me when the movie releases in November. And of course, now that I've seen the trailer once, I won't watch it again.

My normal trailer rules are that I don't watch trailers for movies I already know I want to see. As soon as I realize what trailer it is, I stop watching it. But movies I'm not that excited about get a pass. Instead of worrying about ruining the movie by seeing some of its best imagery in advance, I use the advanced imagery to possibly fuel my excitement about it.

I suppose there's a middle ground where I could go from not wanting to see a movie, to wanting to see it, to having some of its best images ruined for me, all in the space of one trailer. But I'm willing to take the risk, in part because seeing trailers was something that I always used to look forward to until I decided that not seeing them was truer to the experience I want to have with the movies. (It all goes back to that one year where I realized that I hadn't seen a trailer for nine of my top the movies of the year.)

Anyway, Thor: Ragnarok's trailer fucking ruled. Nice job.

And as a validation of my standard trailer-watching policy, the movie I subsequently saw was Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, whose trailers I had been steadfastly avoiding. I ended up liking the movie a fair bit, and I think I can chalk that up in no small part to not having glimpsed any of the images of the movie's opening 20 minutes or so, which are by far its best parts. "That's some Avatar shit right there," I may have even said out loud as I watched the beginning set on the planet Mul, which is an immersive environment on the scale of Pandora.

If Ragnarok immerses me that much and has a good story to boot? Watch out.

Not this year's Jupiter Ascending - or so I hope

After Jupiter Ascending came out two years ago, I didn’t know if there would ever be another Jupiter Ascending again.

I mean, I didn’t want another Jupiter Ascending, per se, because that movie was awful. No sequels necessary. But I did want another “Jupiter Ascending.”

The difference indicated by those quotation marks is as follows: I wanted another movie that took the same risks as Jupiter Ascending, in a genre in which only sure bets are usually green lit. I wanted it still to be possible to have movies that fit that small cinematic niche of “big, imaginative science fiction movie with fantasy worlds and no established characters.” I didn’t want studios only to gamble on Star Wars movies, though that’s obviously no gamble at all. I wanted them to gamble on what might become the next Star Wars.

But after several recent major flops in this arena – Ascending, but more catastrophically, John Carter – it seemed less and less likely that we would see many, or even any, more of these. One cautionary tale is enough for most studios – two, and you have serious cinematic leprosy on your hands. No one wants to go anywhere near it.

So I guess the pressure is really, really on Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

When I was at the movies on Wednesday, I watched enough of the trailer for Luc Besson’s new movie to know that I didn’t want to watch any more of it. In a good way. I start avoiding a trailer once I get to that point where I say “Yep, I’m hooked, now leave the rest of it as a surprise.”

“Hooked” may be the wrong word for Valerian, because there are a million ways a movie like this could go wrong and only a scarce quantity of ways to do it right. So just because it looks nice – like really, really nice – doesn’t mean that it’s got anything going for it.

But if it’s great, I want to experience its greatness unspoiled.

And if it’s not great … well, we definitely won’t see another Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.