It is, perhaps, unfair to compare Jeff Shaara‘s three-minute promotional film for the World War II novel The Steel Wave, which I’ve embedded below, to Steven Pressfield‘s trailer for Killing Rommel. For one thing, Pressfield’s book is a standalone story dealing strictly with the North African front, while Shaara’s book is the middle volume in a trilogy covering the entire European theater of operations.* But, man, what a world of difference.
It’s not just that Pressfield went out into the field to shoot his film (at least, I’m assuming he went to Africa, and not California) while Shaara is plopped in front of a bluescreen that gives him a bad ghost outline whenever he moves. It’s that Pressfield talks about the genuinely compelling story at the heart of his novel and makes you want to read it so you can learn more, while Shaara talks at length about how he wants “to tell the story in a fictitious way without fictitious history.” Granted, “trying to tell you the history without boring you with the history” is a commendable goal, but for the purposes of a trailer, one really does have to ‘sell’ the story a little harder than saying ‘it’s the buildup to D-Day,’ and then explaining how the book’s structure rotates the point of view through a slew of major historical figures and composite characters. (And one certainly doesn’t spend twenty seconds talking about the third book, which isn’t even out yet.) “There’s a lot of mystery and intrigue and suspense in this story,” Shaara observes; I can’t speak as to how effectively the book teases out those elements, but this trailer is a good reminder of the importance of “show, don’t tell.”
*In this vein, I am reminded of my efforts to persuade my then-girlfriend that we should go see Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One: “What’s the plot? The Second World War, that’s the plot!”