“Amazing Spider-Man” Joins “Prometheus” in Overdoing It With the Teasers

The prevailing wisdom in Hollywood these days is clearly "more is more" when it comes to teasers and trailers. It's gotten so bad that trailers have teasers. This week, two films we're dying to see finally reached their saturation point with clips that did nothing but make us feel exhausted.

We have been wowed by the look of "Prometheus," director Ridley Scott's hotly-anticipated prequel to his 1979 masterpiece, "Alien," since the first trailer dropped. Since then we've been impressed by their use of viral videos comprised of footage not in the film that give us a sense of character and tone.

So yesterday, when Apple's iTunes trailer page was hailing an exclusive new clip from the film, we were excited. But rather than dramatic tension or excitement or anything of narrative value, the biggest takeaways from the clip are that there's weather on other planets and "God doesn't build in straight lines." Yawn.

"The Amazing Spider-Man," is another film that's been high on our list, thanks to a steady diet of great clips that peaked with the one released the first of week of May that was attached to "The Avengers." Today comes a four-minute clip (above) for the film from Sony that is overlong and mostly stuff we've seen before. And what little there was that was new is cut in such a way that it does't flow at all--if it's like that in the film, they've got a real problem on their hands.

And don't even get us started on the 4-minute and 35-second clip from "The Dictator" that arrived Monday--the whole film is only 83 minutes long.

We like to see a little skin, but we wish they'd leave something to our imagination.

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