Powerful original pre-release poster

Rating: 8/10 (31 August 2005)

I have yet to see this film but I would like to comment on the first pre-release poster I saw on a huge billboard. The image was very minimal and stark. A black background with a horizontal side-view of a shiny, scuffed machete blade. The only text being a very amateur looking 'Hotel Rwanda' in gold coloured Times New Roman font. Why was this image so powerful? Firstly I could see no clues as to what this poster was advertising, apart from the title obviously but the image itself didn't look like other movie posters, there was something nonconformist and more real about it. No airbrushing, no stylised fonts - just a stark, quite unsettling image of a weapon designed to cause a lot of damage. As much as the poster shook and to some extent impressed me because of it's originality, I thought it was tad insensitive but perhaps that is good for westerners who know so little about what happened. A few days later I could no longer see the original poster, it had been replaced with a more acceptable Hollywood style image, still depicting the machete blade only with airbrushed sad faces of the central characters inside it. That kind of killed my curiosity a bit but nevertheless I'll be renting this out when I have some money. Oh and I rated it 8 to be polite as I haven't seen it yet!