Summer Movie Explosion Preview Spectacular!

Written by Kyle Buchanan

Audiences like to complain that a trailer gives all the movie’s best jokes away, but we think the same could be said about its explosions being spoiled. We took a look at five of the most combustible summer movie trailers to see what impressions we could extract (using a pincer-equipped bomb squad robot, of course).

Star Trek
Total Explosions: The otherwise stellar new trailer features a mere 3 explosions, an unconscionably low amount for such a big movie. Spock, that unfamiliar human emotion you’re feeling is shame.
Featured Explosion: The clip culminates with a full-on assault on the Enterprise (featured above). Intriguingly, the trailer’s previous two explosions dissolve into a birth and a sex scene. In space, exploding vaginas are the final frontier.

Terminator: Salvation
Total Explosions: 7 color-desaturated fireballs.
Featured Explosion: A nuclear cloud demolishes a city, Judgment Day-style. One hopes that Christian Bale’s favorite DP, Shane Hurlbut, didn’t happen to wander into the middle of that shot.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Total Explosions: A Terminator-tying 7.
Featured Explosion: In an homage to the moment that ended the first Mission: Impossible’s trailer, Hugh Jackman is blown onto a helicopter from the sheer concussive blast of an exploding vehicle. Reportedly, Jackman’s mid-air crooning of “And I Am Telling You” was the first thing to be cut from the version leaked online.

Battle for Terra
Total Explosions: 8. And this is an animated family film.
Featured Explosion: A spacecraft explodes amidst trippy jellyfish mushrooms in Lionsgate’s weird cartoon space adventure, which recalls The Phantom Menace, if Jar-Jar was voiced by Justin Long. Yeah, mushrooms seem about right.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Total Explosions: 14. C’mon, like Michael Bay would ever give up this particular summer movie crown (studded, as it is, with tiny, exploding rubies)?
Featured Explosion: The trailer’s very first, an explosion in Paris that harkens back to Bay’s Armageddon. Yes, the Transformers have finally gotten cultured—we can’t wait until a vacationing Megan Fox is kidnapped by Lumiere, the Decepticon streetlamp.