Hola all. Massawyrm here.

If there was one major mistake in what studios brought to show us, it was the folks who treated us to some Push footage. It’s not that the footage was unimpressive or bad – it was that they didn’t bring the trailer to show along with it. When Harry asked how many of us had seen the footage, half a dozen people in the audience responded. And until you’ve seen that trailer, you have no idea what it is or why we’re supposed to think it’s cool.

For the record, Push is one of the films I am eagerly awaiting next year. The trailer is killer. It sells the film as Firestarter on Meth – a rapid fire, ticking clock film about a pair of powerful psychics on the run from a government program that turns people like themselves into weapons. Pretty standard stuff for comic book fans, but the look and feel of it is raw and pretty damned cool. So I was pretty stoked to see the footage. But barely anyone else had any idea what they were looking at outside of seeing a superhero movie from a property they were unfamiliar with (it’s an original.)

The footage we watched was two scenes, both of which appear a couple of times in the trailer. The first was a moderately interesting scene in which guys who scream really loud shatter fish tanks and make fish explode inside them while Dakota Fanning and Chris Evans run from other gun wielding folks. Cool looking, but out of context didn’t really have much of a payoff. It became known as the “exploding fish” sequence to the post-BNAT crowd.

The other was actually quite cool. It was a full on duel between two telekinetics, Chris Evans and the thug of supposedly telepathic Djimon Hounsou. That was the scene that was pretty rockin’, with both guys throwing the other around while floating guns around corners to unload into one another. There was also an awful lot of bullet deflecting going on, pushing this even further out of the Psychic Power Sci-fi oeuvre that it at first appears and deeper into the flashy comic book movie realm. It’s pretty damned cool and a great action sequence that evoked exactly the kind of thing we always see in comics and always wish we could see on screen.

That said, this genre lives and dies in the execution of the story, and frankly, the whole Weapon X thing is starting to get a little stale, so this really needs to have some kick ass story elements going on – none of which they showed us this weekend. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed. This has the potential to be something really neat along the lines of Firestarter or Highlander. Or it could just be this year’s Jumper, fun but altogether hollow. Let’s just hope it’s not something far, far worse. We’ll find out in about 6 weeks.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

Massawyrm

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