A while back, before the final Disney Star Wars sequel was released, they released a trailer for it, and some guy on the internet put up a trailer reaction video on his YouTube channel. His reaction was… well, you kind of need to see it for yourself to believe it.

Much was said about it at the time; I’m commenting now because I think enough time has elapsed that this can, in no way, be considered timely. Timely commentary is often prone to getting caught up in the prevailing emotions of the moment, as well as the factions that form around everything that gets talked about on the internet. Also, at this remove, this reaction is all the more interesting because we know what the movie was like.

By all accounts, the movie was absolutely terrible.

In full disclosure, I was reminded of this because, after mentioning my 17 kiloword review of The Last Jedi, a friend was trying to recommend to me that I watch The Rise of Skywalker and review it because it was, somehow, even worse than The Last Jedi. (I also mentioned how my oldest son wants me to watch it and review it.)

Anyway, I’m not quite sure what to make of the video above. It has been called the ultimate example of consumerist culture; the man is ecstatic with pleasure he cannot express at the trailer for a movie which reasonable people expected to be bad. I do tend towards believing the old saying de gustibus non disputandum est — there is no arguing matters of taste. That said, something seems off with this reaction.

On the other hand, if a man can feel a childlike sense of wonder and amazement over this, there is something good about that. It is possible we do not marvel at grass enough, and if one can marvel at grass, perhaps one could marvel at this trailer, too. But the thing which troubles me about this trailer is that that’s backwards. Grass is, properly considered, a more amazing thing than this trailer.

The real problem is not that he’s so amazed at this trailer, but that he is more amazed at this trailer than at the chair he’s sitting on and the trees he can almost certainly see outside of his window. He was not giggling in giddy exultation over the blue sky and the clouds at the beginning of this video.

The real problem is not that the man in the video finds the trailer to be very good. The real problem is all of the great things in real life that he is missing.