There are plenty of fake movie trailers to be found on YouTube if you scour enough, but the best of these mash-ups tend to be simpler ideas combining video from one movie with an audio from another, or simply re-cutting scenes to give a misleading impression. The more ambitious ones tend to require the overlooking of style combinations that don't line up. What I love about this The Batman Complex trailer is how cohesive it looks.
To achieve that synergy, it takes advantage of two things: Christopher Nolan's tendency to use the same actors, as well as Christian Bale's tendency to play brooding, psychologically challenged characters. The resulting edit is nearly seamless.
The narrative works so well: Bruce Wayne, as portrayed by Bale's weakly character in The Machinist, conceives in his mind to be the strong person that is Batman, which requires Cobb to go into his mind to fix him, but Cobb finds himself trapped in the, um, shuttered island that is Bruce Wayne's psyche.
Nolan's movies do hint at the idea that dressing up as a giant bat is not exactly the product of a healthy mind, and this trailer simply takes it further, with the aid of Clint Mansell's amazing score from The Fountain as the thread.
Just for fun, let's play spot the clips. Sign off in the comments if I missed any.
Batman
Batman Begins
The Dark Knight
The Machinist
Equilibrium
The Prestige
American Psycho
Inception
Shutter Island
Smallville 6.12 - "Labyrinth"
