Battle Los Angeles: We're Total Suckers for Weird Music in Trailers
Here's a trailer for the springtime alien invasion movie Battle: Los Angeles, from horror director Jonathan Liebesman. While the film will probably wind up being standard alien fare, the trailer is almost... beautiful.
That's largely owed the mysterious, evocative song, a composition called "Sun's Gone Dim and The Sky's Black" by Icelandic (natch) musician Jóhann Jóhannsson. It's an eerily effective choice to have playing over silent images of alien destruction and warring Marines. It's an example of how trailer-making really can be an art form, especially given the right song (see recent examples like Where the Wild Things Are and The Social Network). And even though in this case we can be pretty sure the movie itself won't be art (though you never know! District 9!), it's still a lovely and arresting two minutes, and definitely endears me to the movie in a strange way.
Anyway, this movie has been involved in a kerfuffle with the producers of Skyline, a far less-ambitious seeming alien invasion movie coming out this month that was the pet project of the special effects guys who worked on BLA. So it has something to do with conflict of interest or something like that. Really, who cares. This is a great two minute trailer for what will likely be a fun, jittery two hours at the movies come the boring ides of March.