Crashing into your trailers

There are a lot of issues with the state of modern film trailers, including the clumsy way they're edited together, and their naked grasp at emotional resonance by using a slow, sad version of an old pop song. But they've also become so thudding and thumping, punching everything up with loud bursts of drums, with barely any variation, that I can barely watching the fucking things anymore.

It first became really noticable in the trailer for Ad Astra - the 2019 'we had to go to space to find.... ourselves' movie from James Gray - where the opening part showed a disaster on a low-orbit platform that came with a crashing drum noise as each system is hit by an energy pulse in the vacuum of space. It was overbearing, and reduced the thing it was trying to sell to base obviousness.

If you're lucky, the crashes might match the mangled music that's been used. Or it might just be thumping for thumps sake - the sound of someone like the mighty Jason Statham slamming some poor fool's face into a identification pad obviously isn't loud enough, and needs to be augmented with a hugely obnoxious sound effect every time.

It was bad enough when everybody ripped off Christopher Nolan with loud foghorn blasts, but this thudding is getting maddening - reducing big moments to mush, stripping away any artistry with the obviousness of it all.

A good film trailer - a really good one - can be a piece of art in its own right, and can be more thrilling, funny and entertaining in 180 seconds than a two-hour-plus movie it's there to promote (I've never felt the need to watch Fincher's version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo again, but I'll drop everything for its  trailer.)

But then you get something like this, where any mood or style that the long-awaited Sandman series might actually have is ruined by the constant fucking thudding:

This transparent attempt to give every moment some fake impact is so artless and graceless, and doesn't do a service, especially to mid-range films that don't need the punch. Because you don't sell people something by fucking thumping them with it.