This is a lively, engaging, well-cut trailer — congrats to the ad agency or in-house Paramount guys who cut it. I would go so far as to call it a knockout, which is ironic considering that Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing didn’t exactly knock ’em dead when it played two months ago at the Telluride Film Festival. It currently has a 65% and 74% rating with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

Because it’s Friday afternoon and I’ve just woken from a nap and the world could use a little warmth and kindness, I’m posting the following from my 9.2.17 Telluride review: “I am not ‘panning’ Downsizing. It’s definitely a major, highly original, award-season release that everyone will have to see. It will be a huge topic of conversation during the late fall and holiday period. I am in no way saying ‘don’t see this’ or ‘wait for streaming’ or anything along those lines. It’s smartly written, well acted, conceptually daring and certainly an awesome technical achievement.”

Alternate excerpt: “I wanted a whipsmart social satire mixed with a sci-fi adventure about the exotic thrill of suddenly (and somewhat depressingly) being five inches tall and all that would entail, but what I got after the first act ended was a somewhat mopey love story between Matt Damon and a spirited, peg-legged, often-hard-to-understand Vietnamese woman (Hong Chau) living in hand-to-mouth fashion and coping with total methane ruination of the planet.

“It starts out as a kind of grandly visionary Preston Sturges-level social satire, then it downshifts into an occasionally amusing but sad-sacky relationship film, and then it turns soft and sappy and drearily humanistic in the final act. But I never said to myself ‘I’m not admiring this’ or ‘this is boring’ — it’s definitely a first-rate film, and I’m very glad that Payne finally got it made. I just couldn’t get high off it. I tried but it wouldn’t let me.”