Damon’s Fracking Movie Trailer: “Promised Land”

“Cause” movies always tread on the line of being deadeningly earnest. Maybe in this case,Gus Van Sant’s direction might help.

There’s always the possibility of catching a wave of a current event – “China Syndrome” being the template for that.

Trailers also have to be careful not tipping the plot to hard – on first inspection, I’d say Matt Damon plays the soon-to-be conflicted corporate hot shot here, with John Kracinsky as the appealing good guy. Oh, now I see they wrote it. That explains some casting decisions.

CinemaBlend:

Though both Matt Damon and Krasinski say they never would have gotten the roles they have in Promised Land if they hadn’t written the script themselves, it seems to be more true for Krasinski, who has so perfected the role of wry Jim Halpert on The Office that it’s sometimes hard to see him as anyone else. In Promised Land Krasinski starts off a little like Jim, an affable and disarming guy who arrives in the same small town where Damon’s character, representing the gas company, is trying to convince local people to sign their farmland over to natural gas drilling. Krasinski, with his wide smile and plain facts about the dangers of gas drilling, a.k.a. “fracking,” becomes an immediate antagonist for Damon’s character, even when both men are convinced they have the best interest of this rural town at heart. Can the town save itself economically by signing these lucrative gas drilling deals? Or will they doom themselves with the environmental catastrophes fracking can bring?

Promised Land very deliberately doesn’t take a side on that debate, and as directed by Gus van Sant, it’s more interested in the tiny details of small-town life than taking any stand on an issue that’s only now gaining traction in the public conversation. As for Krasinski and Damon, they’re careful to talk about how much research they’ve done into the areas where fracking is happening, how many conversations they had with locals, and how much they each fall in the middle between a potential financial windfall for strapped communities and the environmental damage it could cause.