'The Expendables' Movie Trailer Analysis

 

 

In this blog I shall carrying out a critical analysis of a film trailer for the movie ‘The Expendables’.

 

The intended audience for this film trailer are predominantly males over the age of eighteen that like the thrill of an action movie. Despite this, there is potential that this film may appeal to women on some level. I believe that a film trailer is more likely to entice a female audience to an action movie than a poster for the same movie.

 

The intended audience being male would want to see this movie primarily due to the cast members. The line up of past action movie “hero’s” with those of today would give the intended audience the “wow” factor. This is because the audience will remember the older cast members for the destruction in their previous movies and the audience will have the familiarity of the younger cast members for technological advancements in weaponry and faster and extended hand-fight elements. The amalgamation of these two attributes would make the audience think about what carnage could be created. For the intended audience for an action movie this is what they would like to see as part of the story within the film. Also, in the film trailer there was an “attractive” woman that would appeal to men, mainly for psychological sexual gratification.

 

Partly due to the female character this film trailer would appeal to a female audience. The woman in the film has a dual role that women will be able to relate to. On the one hand she comes across as a “heroine” and then soon after as the “damsel in distress”. There is also a hint within the trailer that there maybe a potential “love” element to it depicted by a short clip of her hugging one of the male characters. This plays on the fact that women, despite modern social conventions, want their men to be “manly”.     

 

Pacifists would certainly be the alienated audience as they dislike the idea of violence, brutality and profanity. Another audience that would be alienated would be religious groups, particularly non-Christians as this film trailer has a representation of good versus evil and the dialogue “We will kill this American disease!” indicates that this group of people will “go to war” with the “American mercenaries”, which due to the American conflict in the Middle East, would have a negative view of this production.

 

Film trailers follow numerous conventions. In this trailer there is the dramatic voice-over, which doesn’t feature so often in modern film trailers, but was widely used in films of the 1980s and 90s. This maybe a reference to the era that Stallone, Lundgren, Willis and Shwarzenegger featured in big budget action movies.

 

The way that the film trailer is edited is another convention. The pace of the “cuts” are quick and snappy to generate a fast pace. The sound effects of gun fire and explosions feature heavily and clips of explosions and gun-fire is at the forefront of film trailers for action movies.

 

The film trailer will also have the production company and the studio of who and where the film was made and also the film’s distributor. The names of the cast members will also appear but, unlike on a movie poster, the “name” will be last. This is because the audience will remember the last name of a movie trailer and very rarely the first, which is normally reserved for the lesser known cast member.

 

The film trailer is also presented to us that this is a movie about good versus evil and this is done by the “American mercenaries” being calm which is in contrast of the “bad guy character” being depicted by someone who is shouting wildly in an aggressive manner.

 

At the end of the film trailer the producers have attempted to add a slight comedic element to end the trailer on “high”.