Summer Trailers, Summer Isle

Normally, I go ga-ga for Google, but their new movie trailer page deserves neither a hundred zeroes nor a single exclamation point. Despite my general antipathy toward the prettified computing of Steve Jobs and company, I have to continue to side with Apple’s well-organized, pristinely displayed collection of movie previews. The inequality (which, as a libertarian type, I’m okay with) is drawn into even sharper focus when you factor in Apple’s Quicktime HD video, which looks rather immaculate on my nifty new outsized widescreen monitor.

While on the subject of net film previews, I’m mildly intrigued by this trailer for the upcoming, Neil Labute-directed remake of The Wicker Man. Starring Nicholas Cage, who seems to enjoy playing with hell-spawned movie fire (he’s also starring in the upcoming flaming-skull biker/demon/superhero film, Ghost Rider), the movie will track a detective (Cage) searching for a missing girl on an island populated by oddly resistant cult members. Robin Hardy’s 1973 original is an intense, deeply disturbing portrait of true evil—a horror movie that relies on psychological dread, human weakness, and man’s capacity for spiritually motivated, unrepentant atrocity to create its chills. Hardy's picture is surprisingly devout, a rare film that seems to take the struggle between Christianity and violent, cultish paganism seriously. In many ways, it’s the antidote to The Da Vinci Code—a terrifying, finely-crafted film that is willing to peel away the serene veneer of the worst pagan cult rituals rather than celebrate them as liberating.

Despite the insertion of standard Hollywood bombast—loud thumps, fast cuts, and Dolby-powered jolts—Labute’s film looks like it will stick relatively closely to the original. I have little doubt that Labute, who never met a cruel human instinct he didn’t like, will keep the original’s audacious ending. I wonder, though, if he’ll also let the original’s respect for faith and Christian commitment shine through.