Advertisement

'Emoji Movie' can probably fit its script in a single tweet

They can make a film out of nothing these days. But in this case, the first trailer is pretty full of nothing, too.

Listen: Nobody had high hopes for a movie based on language-abbreviating conversational images. In fact, it's probably against their broad-strokes ambiguity to give them life and personality in a film. But The Emoji Movie is coming in August 2017 and we all have to deal with that by watching the film's first trailer and queuing up our collective sighs.

Like any youthspeak, emojis have been the subject of countless thinkpieces dissecting the era's new symbolic patois, from how-did-we-get-here to the dilemma of consciously diversifying emoji skin tone to our inevitable societal conversion into thinking exclusively in emoji. I've frontloaded these existential excursions out of the assumption that The Emoji Movie won't go near any of them. But maybe, as you rewatch the trailer for the third time scraping meaning from less-than-a-minute of talking blobs, you'll scare up some hope, any hope, that 2017 will rebound so hard that this film pulls a Lego Movie and shocks us all.