Twilight of the Gods: Final ‘Valkyrie’ Trailer

Tom Cruise, trying to look like a Nazi. Happy Halloween, Tom!

Here’s the final trailer for the much-maligned, much buzzed about Valkyrie. As you’ll no doubt recall, this is the Tom Cruise-Bryan Singer movie about a Nazi plot to assassinate Hitler (and if you have any grasp of history at all, you should realize that it failed. For the rest of you, oops!! Spoiler!!)

I don’t know, if it wasn’t for all the bad pub and the constantly shifting release dates, I dont’ think I’d feel that this movie looked like a bust. One thing, though–it’s always terrible when an actor tries to stretch and, for example, struggles with an accent that’s supposed to lend authenticity. Because that can get so ugly, I can understand why they might have decided to just not have Cruise do an accent if he wasn’t getting it. But it’s just as distracting for a character to have no accent when everyone else does as it is for someone to be attempting a bad one. And while everyone else speaks in “vague British/continental,” the standard way of indicating “these characters are really speaking another European language but we’d rather not subtitle,” Cruise is speaking in flat out American-ese. The fact that he also just looks so all-American is equally disconcerting. If you didn’t know anything about this movie, you’d think that Cruise’s character was a Californian who decided to join the SS on a lark. Well, anyway, crazy as Cruise can be nowadays, I don’t wish him any ill. I hope this movie turns out to be better than everyone seems to think it will be.