“Arthur Christmas” Movie Trailer Review

“Arthur Christmas”

Movie Trailer Review

By our guest blogger, Joe Oliveto

The teaser trailer for next year’s holiday family film “Arthur Christmas” takes a bit of a unique approach. Rather than showing scenes from the film itself, we get the start of a faux-documentary narrated by, of course, Morgan Freeman, only to be interrupted when the camera spies what looks to be a lanky teenage boy in the distance. A very short, panicked man tries to hide the boy and handle some damage control by assuring the cameraman that there was no boy. The short man is an elf, and the boy is Santa’s son.

It’s a clever idea and worthy of a few laughs, but it gets a little forced when the elf begins to go way off on a tangent, addressing every element of Santa Claus’ operation by telling the audience that none of it is going on. Little kids might find it funny, but in the post “Shrek” era, when adults sometimes expect these movies to have enough humor for everyone, parents in the audience may already be groaning with the expectation of being dragged to this movie come next November.

Still, for a teaser, it does the job perfectly, giving us just enough information to have a vague sense of what the movie will be about. It turns out Santa has a son.

Ok, so that’s about all we get, but that’s enough. We don’t know what the actual plot will involve—maybe Santa will have a strained relationship with Arthur, maybe Arthur needs to become the next Santa—but it’s an interesting premise, and when just about every Christmas movie that gets released is immediately forgettable, having an interesting premise is helpful.

Overall, the trailer is decent and right now it wouldn’t be fair to judge whether the film itself will be any good. We’ll have to wait and see. A full trailer should give us a better sense of what it’s all about, anyway.

“Arthur Christmas” will be released in November of 2011.

View the teaser trailer below. What are your thoughts?