Your ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Trailer Breakdown, in Infinity Vision

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in—or at least, they pull me a little closer. After a weekend completely dominated by Odyssey talk (this is a pop culture column, go look for that World Cup analysis somewhere else), Marvel kicked the week off with a big bid to change the conversation: at long last, an honest-to-goodness, non-leaked actual trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. This thing drops in five months and until now all we’ve had is vaguer-than-vague set photos and a handful of loosely connected teasers portending doom—and Doom—and not much else.I was getting restless, chat, I can’t lie. I’m a skeptic who has completely given up on the Marvel TV shows, is going to see Brand New Day dutifully rather than excitedly, and all but assumes the MCU’s best days are long behind it. I may be in the minority, but our ranks are growing, and we need a reason to care. Having said that, I have to admit: this trailer made me twitch a little. But I’m also too cynical to fully start declaring that we’re So Back. So I called up our resident MCU Expert William Goodman to ask why I should still give a fuck, what this trailer means, and if it’s too late for Marvel to recover their swag.William Goodman: Even I have to admit, there’s a bit of a hydrogen bomb-vs.-coughing baby dynamic at play here; dropping this trailer after this past weekend, when everyone is still rightfully energized by The Odyssey, was definitely a choice. No matter; I’ve decided to be as optimistic as I can about Doomsday, because it’s what I’ve hoped/thought the MCU should have built toward this entire cycle.As I’ve written about for the site, the Russo Brothers are adapting the much-beloved Time Runs Out storyline from comic book writer Jonathan Hickman. In Hickman’s Avengers run, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes faced the threat of a series of cosmic events called “incursions,” wherein one parallel universe threatens to subsume another unless one of those realities is otherwise destroyed first. It’s the trolley problem on steroids—would you kill everyone on another Earth to save your own?—and made for fascinating storytelling, with major Marvel heroes like Iron Man, Black Panther, Doctor Strange and Mr. Fantastic struggling with unthinkable choices.Doomsday’s first trailer shows that the Russos are sticking with that framework, but instead of pitting the Avengers and the Fantastic Four against some random other universe that audiences aren’t invested in, they’re leveraging nostalgia for the Fox X-Men characters instead. In short, it’s a giant hero-vs.-hero battle with Doom skulking in the background, presumably hatching some Machiavellian scheme.On paper, it’s a strong concept. But a lot of this will come down to the actual execution. All the fits and starts of this cycle have made it so that getting an audience to care about these stakes is a little harder when the big bad isn’t something that’s been seeded for multiple projects, but instead is being introduced in this film. That’s a big narrative hurdle to clear, but if it’s done well, the stakes could potentially feel much bigger than Infinity War. Lore dump aside, does any of this context get you excited for what’s to come, Frazier?**Frazier Tharpe: **William, thank you for all this wonderful context. It’s much appreciated and very helpful. I have two words for you though: “Infinity Vision.” In my best Dennis the Beeper King voice, What is it? Who really knows? The fact that Marvel is releasing this movie on an Usher Bucks format to make up for getting absolutely boxed out of IMAX cinemas by Dune 3 on Dec 18th represents this whole Doomsday ordeal in a microcosm: they’re chasing motion that’s no longer quite in their grasp.This is like the Iceman of movie trailers. It slaps, and then seems a little less impressive the minute you apply any critical thought. Seeing the aughts-era X-Men again felt like a visit from long-lost friends. But this is a trailer so OD’d on nostalgia and cameos designed make Reddit go crazy that they have Channing Tatum Gambit in here, a NeverWas who ended up being a literal joke in Deadpool & Wolverine. It’s time to get serious now, and he’s the last MF to get that across.Speaking of getting serious, I saw someone on Twitter compare Thor’s speech to Darvin Ham pumping up the Lakers, and now I can’t unhear it.My last quibble… all that doom-and-gloom talk that’s supposed to raise the stakes? Means absolutely nothing in a trailer that’s spotlighting like four or five people who already died.WG: Sadly, this is the corner they’ve backed themselves into, so for the most part this is a little bit of what we see is what we get. That also goes for the film’s actual visuals, which look a little shaky despite the Russos shooting most of it on practical sets. I definitely think it’s taken a while to get this trailer out because the team is still working on VFX shots, and that’s even apparent here in moments like Namor flying. Hopefully some of that is ironed out by the time the finished product arrives in December.There’s two main battles here : One, getting anyone to care about this while introducing Doom in this movie. I think you and I had similar reactions when we first heard Doom was going to be the villain; he’s god-tier when executed correctly, but bringing him into the proceedings this late in the game, combined with the Robert Downey Jr. of it all, felt like reheated nachos even before we got this trailer. I don’t know if there’s enough happening here to change the tide on that.And there’s no question the superhero genre is seeing a falloff. Supergirl was not it, despite a valiant effort from Milly Alcock to hold the whole thing together; Spider-Man: Brand New Day will probably do well because it’s Spider-Man and people are generally pretty high on the Tom Holland version of the character, but we know which Tom Holland/Zendaya movie is winning this season. Doomsday should also do well financially, but I’m less confident in the movie’s ability to command the attention of the culture the way Infinity War and Endgame did.Where do you stand on RDJ’s Doom and the cultural importance of Marvel as it stands now?FT: I’m into the Doom restraint and continuing to let RDJ just post up and aura farm, but man that’s a gamble that really has to pay off when it’s time to finally see him in action. I think this whole thing would feel less shaky if the last couple of phases had done the required leg work to make us care about some of these new cats. It’s Doomsday, but when you see Captain Sam, the Thunderbolts, Shang-Chi, and Namor—who, I’ll be honest, I completely forgot about until you just name-checked him—it feels more like Meh-Day. I don’t want to sound like too much of a hater. I would love for this movie to be great, especially because a re-energized MCU means holding out hope for a successful X-Men reboot. But this trailer is just one small step up a very big hill. Some might call it a Sisyphean feat. And just like that, we’re back talking about the ancient Greeks again. Oops.