Well, this isn’t going to end well for anyone.
It’s been a couple of years in development hell but now, at long last, we can dust off our old 50 Shades puns and start all over again. Have you heard that Christian Grey was fired from his company after a salary scandal? There were 50 Grades of Pay. Apparently he went bankrupt and had to work on a farm to pay off his debts. He had to harvest 50 Bales Of Hay. After that, he had to be very frugal when it came to buying new bondage equipment. He had to be Thrifty Shades Of Grey.
But that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here because the first global trailer has been released, and we owe it to you and ourselves to take a closer look and make a few guesses about the final 50 Shades of Grey movie, when it’s released in 2015. On Valentine’s Day. Yeah, perfect first date material.
Here’s the trailer, just in case you’ve been trapped in an elevator for the past week and missed it. In fact, if you have been trapped in an elevator for a week, you’ll feel right at home with this trailer. Elevators feature quite heavily.
And there we have it. 2 minutes and 20 seconds of women looking nervous in elevators and men looking absently out of windows. And a dinner scene with the in-laws. Raunchy stuff.
Let’s recap what we’ve seen.
We meet Ana Steele straight off the bat, looking like the unlikely offspring of Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada and Zooey Deschanel in everything Zooey Deschanel has ever been in.
Anastasia has a couple of questions for Mr. Grey, so she wanders into his reception – which is apparently staffed entirely by Aryan Fembots from the future.
“Mr. Grey will see you nowERROR 404 DOES NOT COMPUTE KILL ALL HUMANS”
Grey Enterprises Holdings Ltd’s reception area reminds us of this scene from Tron: Legacy.
Oh, and we never noticed this before, but… Grey Enterprises Holdings Ltd? Not exactly catchy, is it?
“Hello and thank you for calling Grey Global International Enterprises Conglomerated Holdings Limited Incorporated, how may I direct your call?”
And soon, Ana is led meekly into Grey’s office. He stands, looking intensely out of the window. This is another recurring theme with Mr. Grey: Ana has her elevators, Christian has his windows.
“Look how intense my back is! Oh hey, the office opposite mine has nice windows. Jeeves, fetch me my catapult.”
Then the trailer teases us with shot after shot of out of focus Grey’s…
“Did you notice how intense my middle finger is? It’s pretty intense.”
“My hand is so intense that I could probably snap this table if I wanted to.”
“The back of my head is so intense it should come with a warning label.”
And then… BOOM. Moneyshot. You have to hand it to them, after auditioning just about every man in Hollywood, the final Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) is pretty on point – maybe because there’s just a hint of Colin Firth about him.
Obviously, Ana is thunderstruck straight away, as you can tell from this shot of her getting into an elevator.
And before you know it, Cristian is trying to suck Ana’s eyes out. In an elevator.
And the rest is history. There’s some other stuff in the trailer, for example this shot of Christian piloting a glider and very literally turning Ana’s world upside down, which is a bit heavy-handed for a trailer:
Let’s get to the meat, to the good stuff. Expect to be seeing this picture on your Facebook feeds for the next three years:
So what can we learn about the finished film from this trailer? Well, there’s good news, and there’s bad news. There’s not an inner goddess, an “oh my” or a “laters babe” anywhere in sight. Hurrah, that’s good news. And on the whole it seems like the filmmakers have done justice to the source material without just blindly following it. Take a look at the decor of Grey’s office:
The shattered sphere sculpture, the moody, listing ships, the chair deliberately chosen to make Anastasia look small, it’s all very clever scenery and it shows that, whatever the final movie is like, it’s going to be close in tone to the book.
Very promising. Also promising is the little glimpses we get of the Red Room and of the sex scenes.
On first impressions, then, the sex scenes look pretty good – as long as you consider the sex scenes in the book good, of course. They appear pretty accurate, relatively explicit, and created by people who know what they’re doing. In fact, we know that the filmmakers were experts, because they chose the LELO Intima silk blindfold. Christian Grey really DOES have class:
But there’s a problem, and it’s that this scene…
…reminds us so much of this scene…
…that we simply can’t think about anything else now. And we wonder if we’re onto something here: judging from the trailer, is it possible that 50 Shades is in fact Bridget Jones’ Diary with all the humor taken out and all the sex left in?
We dare you to watch it again right now and not start drawing parallels with Bridget Jones. Double dare you.
Ah well, if that’s the case, we can live with it, mainly because the soundtrack of this trailer is outstanding. A completely reworked, stomping, sexy version of Crazy In Love, made exclusively for the movie. It’s brilliant.
In Conclusion…
Whether you love the 50 Shades series or hate it, you can’t deny that one of the major outcomes was that it opened up conversations all over the world about sex. Every generation has its sexually-defining piece of media, 50 Shades is ours and whether it’s done more harm than good is still up for debate. But that’s part of the point: the fact that it’s generating debate at all is a progressive sign.
I guess we’ll have to reserve judgement for now. In the meantime…
