This Avengers: Doomsday Trailer Can’t Be Serious

“Something’s coming,” an ominous voice warns at the start of the Avengers: Doomsday trailer, “something we may not be able to deter.” That something is probably referring to Dr. Doom — the franchise’s latest big bad played by onetime big good Iron Man actor Robert Downey Jr. — but it mostly feels like a warning about the movie itself, which has been teased for what feels like millennia. Like all Marvel movies, Avengers: Doomsday peddles in apocalypse across time and space, forcing our heroes, some of whom know each other and some of whom don’t, to band together in order to defeat an extraterrestrial baddie once and for all.

The Doomsday trailer, however, is light on plot and heavy on guys looking across rooms at each other and nodding or looking slightly confused. The Fantastic Four are skeptical to meet the Thunderbolts who are actually the New Avengers. M’Baku (Winston Duke) shakes hands with the Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach); Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby sans beach waves) nods knowingly at Shuri (Letitia Wright). Poor Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen are back in the mix, reprising their X-Men roles, and somehow, Channing Tatum is Gambit, like, for real and not as a joke. Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) is there; does anyone know what Shang-Chi has been up to these past five years? All of these later-generation heroes take the backseat once the trailer reveals something we’ve known all along, which is that Chris Evans is back as Steve Rogers a.k.a Captain America. It’s a bit of a letdown to imagine being one of the later-iteration Avengers and having to once again take a backseat to an original guy. There’s no way that at least 90 minutes of this allegedly 165-minute movie isn’t these guys all meeting up in different combinations and explaining their deal to one another. Or maybe they can sit down and watch a 25-minute YouTube primer to get a sense of what they’ve all been doing and who they are in relation to each other. Regardless, the heft of this project is such that the first real look should feel more fun, or more serious, and not this strange combination of close-ups and lens flares. Alas, Avengers: Doomsday opens in theaters on December 18, the same day as Dune: Part Three. Best of luck to movie-theater employees everywhere.