TRAILER TALK
Unfiltered, uncensored, uncompromising trailer reactions from team EMPIRE
Team Empire watches the first teaser for Christopher Nolan’s new movie, and tries to stop their brains leaking out their ears.
James Dyer (Digital Editor-in-chief ): Right! ‘Palindrome: The Movie’, then.
Chris Hewitt (Re.view Editor):
[Reading from his phone] “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!”
John Nugent (News Editor): I’m excited. I love a Christopher Nolan head-scratcher.
Ben Travis (Online Staff Writer): Should we start the trailer at the end?
Joanna Moran (Photography Director): Very excited to see John David Washington again. I loved him in Blackkklansmen.
Nick de Semlyen (Features Editor): There are rumours this is ‘Inception 2’. As in, it’s a stealth sequel.
James: I profoundly hope that isn’t true.
John: They look quite similar. It’s the Nolan style, isn’t it? It’s even got the Nolan font.
James: What is that font, Chris?
Chris Lupton (Creative Director): It’s… Franklin Gothic, maybe?
Stuart Manning (Designer): I think it’s ITC Conduit.
James: I’m enjoying this reverse abseil.
John: So what’s going on here?
James: They’re getting catapulted up the building.
John: It’s a great stunt, whatever it is.
John: Is that a bullet?
Chris Lupton: It’s a capsule.
Ben: A time capsule?
John: But not the Blue Peter kind.
Chris Hewitt: It kind of looks like cyanide or something. He’s frothing at the mouth in the next shot.
Nick: Time juice!
Jamie Inglis (Deputy Art Director): Maybe they’re saying that when you die, everyone then goes backwards.
Nick: Who’s that?
Chris Hewitt: Martin Donovan, who Nolan worked with in Insomnia. He was Al Pacino’s partner. And he was in Ant-man, of course.
John: He says: “Welcome to the afterlife.” What are we to make of that?
James: I don’t think it’s literally heaven. It’s either a codename, or he died and then they reversed time so it’s technically an afterlife because they’re going backwards.
Jamie: Do you think whenever they’re going backwards, everyone else is going forwards?
John: It might be a story told from two different timelines. Very Memento.
Jamie: At some point, someone’s going to put poo up his bum, and food’s going to come out of his mouth. [The trailer is paused while everyone laughs for five minutes]
John: Woah! Reverse boat!
Ben: He accidentally reversed a scene from Dunkirk.
Chris Hewitt: ‘Mr Owl ate my metal worm!’
John: Are you just saying palindromes?
Chris Hewitt: It’s R-patz! And, er, J-d-wash!
Nick: This feels like a training sequence. He’s going to learn the art of time manipulation.
Chris Lupton: This is like the thing in
Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., where they touch the thing and go to another fucking planet.
Nick: I saw someone say online that Nolan films always have one character who looks like Nolan. R-patz is basically dressed as Nolan this time.
Chris Hewitt: Anyone think R-patz won’t
turn out to be the bad guy?
Nick: “Something worse than nuclear holocaust…” That line reminds me of the line in Team America — “It’ll be like 9/11 times a hundred.”
John: But what is worse than a nuclear holocaust?
Nick: “Reverse poo”. Do you think humanity is going to be rewound, until it doesn’t exist anymore?
John: A time apocalypse!
Chris Hewitt: He loves paradoxes, Nolan.
Interstellar is built on a paradox.
James: It’s Michael Caine! [A mass of Michael Caine impressions begin]
Nick: This is why some people think it’s linked to Inception — Michael Caine pops up looking very similar to how he looks in Inception.
Chris Hewitt: I don’t think so. Anyway, here they are on a catamaran. Is “catamaran” a palindrome? Almost!
Nick: This final sequence is pretty cool.
John: It seems like it starts in reverse, then moves into linear time? Or the other way around? Either way, I’m in.
James: That is not how you drive down the motorway.
Ben: “Don’t try to understand it.” That’s a very appropriate line for a Christopher Nolan movie.
Ben: It seems like we’re going to have a bunch of action sequences on the scale we’d expect, but everything is backwards?
Chris Hewitt: My feeling is that they are moving backwards, but everyone else is moving forwards.
Nick: It’s like that Red Dwarf episode. At some point, someone’s going to go to a bar and order a pint of “erskib”.
Nick: With better clothes.
John: And reverse pooing.
Chris Hewitt: “A Santa lived as a devil at NASA!”