Super Bowl Spot - Jason Bourne

Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon to the rescue! Rather than let Jeremy Renner tank the franchise, the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum team are back, driving SWAT trucks through brightly coloured gridlock. Based on this short clip Greengrass is still very much in love with chaotic, hand-held reportage. The arrangement does look a little less seizure inducing though - we're asked to drink in Damon as a twisting, mechanical lump here rather than just glimpsing shredded encounters between countless darkly coloured limbs.

Super Bowl Spot - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

Bebop? Rocksteady? KRANG?

Sold.

Super Bowl Spot - Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War's superhero piley-on is a strange direction for Marvel's best sub-franchise. Captain America: The Winter Soldier turned heads by focusing on 80s action norms like car crashes and bone-crunching interpersonal violence. Civil War bucks that trend, threatening more weightless, CG tomfoolery.

MY HAND AT YOUR THROAT

Dead sporting of Zack Snyder to go to all the trouble of shooting a disappointing Superman film just so he can put Ben Affleck's Batman over. Henry Cavill's supercilious Superman is exactly the kind of prick you can build a Rocky IV narrative around. The real hero is the human who spends months deep underground, angrily dragging around a wet tractor tire so he can bulk up enough to go punch out God.

LET US PRAY

"I don't think this stuff happens in a Mylar-snug vacuum. I think that it's when this kind of material works, it's drawn from the sources around you but it's turned into metaphor. 

I'm waiting for the pop-cultural metaphor for 9/11. I haven't seen a sign of it yet. But just like Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a response to Communism, and film noir itself was a response, essentially, to Pearl Harbor and the Second World War, there will be something that surfaces. It might be a Western. It won't, specifically, resemble what happened."

-- Frank Miller speaking to Gary Groth of The Comics Journal in January 2003.

There's a case to be made that the Marvel cycle currently tearing down the box-office is exactly what Miller is describing - a pop-culture reflex that clearly delineates good and evil. The Avengers, made up of an ex-GI, an arms dealer, and a couple of rehabilitated assassins on super-secret service retainer, are the good guys. Thanos and the army of vaguely Egyptian jackal-men he gifts Loki are the bad guys. As with Star Wars and Vietnam, the culture heals itself by dreaming up realms untainted by implication.

That's not to say the Marvel material isn't evolving. Captain America: The Winter Soldier talked about the potential for duplicity when you have an organisation that puts itself above the governments of Earth. Avengers: Age of Ultron might even demonise Tony Stark's relentless push towards total automation. Those ideas are trace elements though. In comparison, this trailer for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice reads like vandalism.

Although casting rumours point towards an overstuffed mess, this trailer is refreshingly simple. A mechanised Batman has made it his business to tear Superman out of the sky. Colour provided by talking heads that reference The Church of Superman that rose out of Metropolis' ashes in The Dark Knight Strikes Again. This underwhelming, underperforming Man of Steel is explicitly framed as a God. Ben Affleck's Bootstraps Batman means to teach him some humility. A different kind of simplicity, aggressive and nihilistic, but at least it's cinematic. Warner Bros and DC are blowing their wad, racing through Frank Miller's deathlessly antagonistic work to firmly establish an alternative to Marvel's conveyor belt of three-star entertainment.

INVINCIBLE JUNK

It's a shame we've got to endure several more sequels after Terminator: Genisys, John Connor as a bastardised electronic murderer would be a fitting end to this increasing ordinary series. It weaponises the idea of sequels, and their incestuous, obsessive reconfiguring of already extant material.

To wit, the incessant time stream meddling by both Skynet and the human resistance has given rise to alpha being who wants to be the only thing left standing. John Connor as a temporal God of Destruction. He combines both aspects of his enemies, he is simultaneously human and machine. Invincible but scarred.

This John Connor doesn't want to save humanity, he needs to eradicate the forces that put him in this position - the futuristic hyper-computer who rules the future and the parents who conceived him. Kill them all, stamp them into dust so John Connor, seated on a throne of bones and twisted machinery, can finally feel a sense of peace.

METS

SUPER BOWL SPOTS - Terminator: Genisys

Terminator: Genisys goes for the Dad crowd in its Super Bowl Spot, selling heavily on Schwarzenegger's presence. Shame he looks so rickety. The star's big reveal is a straight cop from Indian action flick Singham, with Schwarzenegger looking pained as he casually disembarks from a speeding car. Genisys, whose best moments here are still essentially nostalgia prompts, looks like a Terminator film filtered like superhero histrionics. The films cyborgs look like they have zero in common with James Cameron's pursuit men, instead they're invincible junk who'll throw their arm away.

KEEP QUIET / SINGLE FILE

George Romero's advert for Resident Evil 2, starring a young Brad Renfro. Always wondered if this ad campaign was an attempt to fob off Romero seeking any remuneration for all the lifts from his Dead films. The SWAT team vs zombies idea the series is built on is straight out of Dawn of the Dead. I remember some early footage from the cancelled version of the sequel on GamesMaster featuring the player characters fumbling around with some twisted security shutters. Although most people assumed this meant the game was set in or around a mall, it's more likely it was intended to be part of the ultra-modern, riot proof police station that anchored that games events.

DINOBOTS

According to a Beijing News interview with producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Transformers: Age of Extinction will feature the Dinobots. Given that this is still a Michael Bay joint, no doubt Grimlock and pals will either be given massive swinging genitalia or racially insensitive voices. Maybe both. Personally, I'd position Grimlock as a one-man demolition unit, obsessed with his destructive potential. He'd start out with a rugged vehicle mode, probably a truck like Prime, and find it wanting. Not enough gun. Next he might try out life as a tank and be disappointed with his overall lack of rapid manoeuvrability. Earth modes would be a massive disappointment to him. He'd rack his brains searching for a transformation that meets his cataclysm criteria before eventually discovering Earth's long extinct terrible lizards. Tyrannosaurus Rex. Love at first sight.

SUPER-GOD MASTERFORCE

Three ads for Takara's Transformers: Super-God Masterforce toyline. These tokusatsu shorts feature Metalhawk, the leader of the Japanese Autobot Pretenders; Buster and Hydra, the Masterforce counterparts for Dreadwind and Darkwing; and Super Ginrai, the toy the west would call Powermaster Optimus Prime.

BERANDAL

This teaser has been doing the rounds, supposedly giving us a first look at The Raid's sequel. Digging a little deeper though, it seems like this might actually be a proof of concept clip shot before The Raid when Gareth Evans was trying to secure funding for a prison fight flick called Berandal. When that project fell through, Evans narrowed his focus, and began thinking about tower blocks.

CUFFLINKS

Looks like OO7 is having a nightmare time in this new international ad for Skyfall. Underestimated by his superiors and foes alike, nursing a shoulder wound courtesy of a fellow MI6 agent, and, to top it all off, pursued by an out-of-control industrial excavator. But, despite all that, fuck having loose cufflinks. An international man of mystery's gotta look correct.

BLACK BLACK

ADVERTISING

Virus City

After several middling gameplay clips failed to wow, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City finally warms up by shilling on pure nostalgia. Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis have been image plundered to ignite some excite. With full HD remix remakes looking increasingly unlikely for the two PlayStation sequels, this could be as close as we'll get to a bells and whistles re-experience. As well as a Leon S Kennedy NPC running around causing havoc, we get Claire Redfield, the Mr X Tyrant, Nemesis, and William Birkin's mutating G monster. Best of all, we also get a glimpse of fourth survivor Hunk, larking about with the Umbrella Special Forces team. Hopefully, that means Tofu will put in an appearance. Shame, all these face toys seem to be off limits, players stuck playing as interchangeable gas-mask people. Shame. Almost got excited then.

I HIT A NAZI

Italian Spiderman is dead!

Long live Danger 5!

"We need a shadow of our own."

The outlook's pretty bleak for national monuments in this latest piece of Modern Warfare 3 hype - France's Iron Lady looks like she's about to topple over. Despite some appearances to the contrary, Modern Warfare 3 runs on a new version of the standard Call of Duty engine. Unofficially referred to as IW 5.0, this iteration allows for the faster streaming needed for all the vast, brutalised urban landscapes on show here. The warhorse IW 3.0 engine, used by such titles as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Black Ops, continues to heavy lift behind-the-scenes for Activision's 007 titles.

"The will of a single man can be broken."

Less than a month until Modern Warfare 3 hits, time for another hysteria trailer! Over the course of three games, the Modern Warfare series has shifted from World War II missions in a contemporary setting to the kind of denied-ops meta-narrative usually seen in Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid games. This campaign clip almost ignores the idea of an America under siege to focus on rhetoric posturing between a Russian radical nationalist and a Cockney war criminal. We're in the realms of superheroics here. A weightless shoot-out on a Presidential airliner only serves to make this point explicit. Considering the countries Call of Duty mainly sells in, and the conflicts we're currently involved in, maybe that's the only tasteful way to conceptualise war on this scale? Last year's Medal of Honor struggled to juggle what it saw as an 'authentic military experience', and basic gameplay demands. The result was a dull, dawdling single-player, spotted with a morally detached jingoism that revelled in the implication that Pakistan was next on the Coalition of the Willing's international hit-list.

THUNG 2

The most unwanted follow-up since An American Werewolf in Paris continues the anti-wow with this red band attention grabber. Jump scares! Imperilled hotties! No obvious practical creature effects! This shit looks antithetical to the utter hopelessness the Carpenter flick routinely generated. Aside from a whip thick tentacle capped with a flower-head sucker, the biology of the creature is failing to excite. Bottin's beast was an impossible mess of innards programmed to ensnare. This calibration lacks anything approaching that level of intensity - shifting bones and bits are always concealed by elasticated, discoloured, CG skin. Deforming human shapes can be fun, but the thing shouldn't have base elements, it should be insane.