Closing my eyes was enough

I went to see Mortal Kombat today as part of a day off to use up some comp time. It being my first blockbuster in the theater in about six weeks (since Godzilla vs. Kong), I was exposed to a lot of trailers I hadn't seen before. (The movie itself was not terrible, but I was a bit bored by it, despite some enjoyable gore and f-bombs.)

Now, you may remember that I don't like to watch trailers nowadays. They give away too much. It doesn't matter so much if I don't care about the movie, but it's a tricky proposition, because sometimes you'll start watching a trailer without knowing what the movie is, and whether its images are something you'll want to avoid. You have to tread carefully.

It was that scenario that exposed me to a good deal of the Dune trailer in the lobby. I didn't even realize it was the trailer for Dune until I'd been watching it for about 20 seconds and Timothee Chalamet finally came on screen. I averted my eyes before the big final shot of the trailer, most likely the worm bursting out of the ground, as I could hear the way it shattered the earth around it.

Once I was seated, it was decision time again. I could tell straight away that the trailer for the next Fast and the Furious movie was coming on. Since I'm not a devotee of the series (though I've seen them all) and since I was kind of starved for the theatrical trailer experience, I made the decision to watch the whole trailer. By the end, I wished I hadn't.

So when the trailer for A Quiet Place Part II came on, I decided to go for my old standby behavior when I'm trying to block out all the information from a particular trailer: Close my eyes, cover my ears, and even making a loud murmuring sound so I don't hear the dialogue. (Not loud loud, but loud enough so I can't hear anything else myself.) 

It's a tedious endeavor, and I'm sure a ridiculous display to others sitting around me. Fortunately, there are not generally others sitting around me these days. Especially at 12:15 on a Friday, where the 500-seat theater had only about five other people in it. 

In this case, though, closing my eyes was enough. 

I realized straight away that the unique thing about A Quiet Place Part II was that the trailer would be almost entirely visual, because the movie is all about keeping your mouth shut. Oh, there were a couple lines of dialogue in the trailer, but it was almost a sort of zen experience having only my eyes closed and knowing that no further meaningful information would be imparted to me.

It had a funny conclusion though. I suddenly started hearing a lot of laid back voices that sounded like they were really having fun. Because I had no real audio queues to let me know the trailer was ending, I assumed it was still going on. My first thought was "Oh great, now I know our main characters are able to find some kind of safe haven where they can laugh and splash around in a pool." The spoilers had gotten past my defenses after all.

Of course, I opened my eyes and found that I was now watching a mobile phone ad.