It’s been a while since I’ve had such giddy excitement for a movie, but Joker has me feeling all sorts of glee. With a little over a month until the movie releases, Warner Bros. went ahead and released the second and final trailer for the upcoming movie, and I feel like we still don’t know that much about the movie. That’s perfectly okay though. I’d prefer a trailer that tells me barely anything about the movie instead of a trailer that spoils the whole movie.
We see Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck living his life as a struggling comedian with a very dark mindset. He constantly has dark thoughts, but he still pushes past it all to try and make people feel happy and laugh. Of course Fleck will eventually break and undergo a metamorphosis into the Joker, but everything after that point is up in the air. Riots, talk shows, brawls, and general chaos overrule the second half of the trailer, which does everything in its power to make me excited to see what the hell is going to happen here and how the Joker goes from a no name into a master criminal, if he even does.
At this point, between the hard R rating the film has and the prestige premiere it’s getting at the New York Film Festival, there’s a lot of genuine hype building up for Joker, more so than any other DC film in the past couple of years. People want to see it because it looks like a great movie. No continuity shenanigans, just a compelling take on a compelling villain. Hopefully if this movie is as good as the hype is making it out to be, DC will take a hint from its success and steer more of its films to be independent of each other once more and not as a part of a bloated, poorly planned “cinematic universe.”
Joker releases October 4, 2019.
