‘Midnight Special’ Trailer: Jeff Nichols Channels Carpenter and Spielberg and It Looks Great
Posted on Monday, February 15th, 2016 by Jacob Hall
Writer/director Jeff Nichols says that one of his chief inspirations for Midnight Special was John Carpenter’s Starman, and the new trailer for this mysterious film evokes that undervalued gem and more. While the preview is intentionally bereft of hard information on plot or characters, the vibe here is totally old school Steven Spielberg. This trailer contains that combination of awe and conspiracy that makes Close Encounters of the Third Kind such an incredible work, but there’s definitely a larger Amblin thing going on here. So many of the films produced under Spielberg’s iconic banner where “family movies” that never avoided going for the throat, genre adventures for all ages that never spoke down to the audience.
The new Midnight Special trailer looks like the paranoid sci-fi of the ’70s collided with a classic ’80s Amblin film and it looks fascinating. You shouldn’t expect anything less from the director of Mud, Take Shelter, and Shotgun Stories.
