Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery has had its official trailer released, which proves writer-director Rian Johnson’s greatest filmmaking trait. Glass Onion is the next installment in the Knives Out franchise, and sees Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc attending a murder mystery party; when someone turns up dead for real, Blanc must crack the case. Like the first Knives Out movie, Glass Onion is written and directed by Rian Johnson, and will showcase his unique skills as a storyteller.
Arguably Rian Johnson’s most notable attribute is his ability to take the norms and expectations of a genre or franchise and subvert them to create something entirely new altogether. This was seen with Knives Out, with the trailers presenting the film as a cliché, Agatha Christie-like murder mystery, with the film revealing an entirely different type of murder mystery full of twists and turns of the formula. The next murder mystery, Glass Onion, promises to do exactly the same, with the official trailer for the film again presenting a cliché, by-the-books whodunnit story. The early reviews for the film, however, paint Glass Onion as having even more twists than its predecessors, proving that Johnson’s best trait of redefining the rules of a genre remains intact.
Glass Onion’s Trailer Is Intentionally Cliché
The main thing that sells Johnson’s perfect trait of subverting expectations is just how intentionally stacked Glass Onion’s official trailer is with those expectations and clichés. Even more so than the first Knives Out, Glass Onion’s cast seems to be more akin to a typical murder mystery, with colorful, bright, eccentric, and quirky characters all coming together. On top of that, all these characters are invited to one secluded area, in this case an island, in which they have to solve a murder mystery party gone wrong.
The Glass Onion trailer shows the party being derailed, a gunshot through broken glass, and a pitch-perfect scream from Kate Hudson that all feel terribly cliché for the genre. All of this just goes to show how intentional Johnson is in meticulously crafting something that seems to conform to genre norms, before pulling the rug out from underneath the audience and taking them on a twisty thrill ride, which is something that made Knives Out so great in the first place.
Rain Johnson Subverting Expectations Is Great (Despite The Last Jedi Reactions)
Johnson choosing to make movies that purposefully subvert expectations is something that cinema as a whole needs more of. The filmmaker has proven to stick to his guns and do this even with huge franchises, as evidenced by Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The trouble with that came from the sheer expectation from Star Wars fans for the film to follow the conventions known to a Star Wars movie, which unfortunately led to highly divisive reactions. Despite these reactions, The Last Jedi’s willingness to stray from expectations resulted in something highly original, intensely engaging, and one of the best Star Wars movies since The Empire Strikes Back. Outside of Star Wars, Knives Out’s subversion also made for one of the best modern murder mysteries, something that Glass Onion looks to continue if the intentional clichés of the trailer are anything to go by.
