To be fair, this trailer is ridiculous, but it's also ridiculously awesome. And that really sums up its duality: Sure, it's bloated and self-congratulatory; yeah, it's basically a two-minute onslaught of absurdly stylized CGI explosions and retarded one-liners. But there's also a sly, bread-and-circuses wink embedded in the dumb: You're going to lap this shit up, America, but we're not really serious about it.
And Hollywood certainly can be clever when it comes to sending up itself, but this trailer in particular walks a fine, postmodern line: When you say "old man my ass" after blowing something up, John Malkovich, is that really a parody of a hackneyed one-liner, or is that just a hackneyed one-liner? It's hard to say, and the answer is probably somewhere in between, but at least one thing is certain: It's goofy as hell.
