By: Russ Burlingame on July 21, 2012
Like my esteemed colleague, I too am holding out hope for a great Superman adaptation coming next year in the form of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, and like my colleague, I got a look at the film’s teaser trailer late Thursday night, attached to the trailer reel at the beginning of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.
And like my colleague, my heart swelled a little when Superman’s father said…
…wait, what? Which father said what now?
In a clever, unannounced marketing bait-and-switch, Warner Brothers has attached two different trailers to seemingly random prints of this week’s much-anticipated Batman finale, each one giving only a slight taste of what to expect from Snyder’s Superman, but narrated by a different one of Superman’s fathers. While the version described in our first story–narrated by Jonathan Kent, played by Kevin Costner–is widely available online, the other version is not.
(To be clear, I saw the same Costner variant as well; I just wanted to have a little fun with the format here.)
In the other version, first reported by Screen Crush, it’s Jor-El (Russell Crowe) who’s talking to his son, telling him that “You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time you will help them accomplish wonders.”
While neither of the films necessarily has the excitement and action fans saw at the Comic-Con panel, the narration is spot-on, and suggests that the filmmakers (particularly the writers) have cracked the code in terms of what makes Superman tick. Now, all they need is a plot that makes some kind of logical sense (something that’s been lacking for the last thirty years’ worth of Superman films) and they could have something really fantastic.
