Coming off all the Super Bowl ad-hype, it was obvious Sony Pictures needed to strike the iron while it was hot and catapult themselves onto the hype train like some sort of illegal immigrant trying to hitch a ride from the U.K., into Poland. The problem, however, is that Sony’s upcoming fall release of Venom isn’t ready. In fact, it’s so not ready that they literally had nothing to show for the actual character of Venom.

The teaser trailer is just a little under two minutes long, but the hilarious part about it is that it doesn’t really show anything. The action beats make no sense in the context of what Eddie Brock is saying in the narration, voiced and played by Tom Hardy, and the plot itself doesn’t really seem to make itself clear in the context of the visuals on display. In fact, if you turned off the sound and just watched the clips successively, you would have no clue what the movie is about. Likewise, if you just listened to the audio and didn’t watch the visuals, you would still end up scratching your head by the end of it.

But don’t take my word for it, scope it out for yourself in the trailer below.

Hardy sounds like he’s putting something into the role, I can’t say for sure if it will deliver when the film launches this fall… but you can tell he’s at least not trying to phone it in. He’s already paid his super hero dues as a villain in The Dark Knight Rises, so he knows that depending on how he carries his part will greatly determine how well the film will resonate with audiences. Even a well-directed, well-written flick can still fall into the gutter with the wrong casting, like The Dark Tower, for instance.

In this case, I’m not worried about the casting but about the plot.

Circling back around to the action beats… I understand that Sony wanted to show something “exciting” to the audiences by having some sort of physical actions taking place, but showing some Force-style powers on display does little to imbue hope for a coherent flick, and showcasing an out-of-context chase sequence with two cars slamming into some parked vehicles does even less to inspire hope for this film to turn out to be anything more than a mediocre dud.

Of course, this is just a teaser trailer… right? I think I already know where my intuition falls but I’ll wait for the full reveal before making any snap judgments.

For now, I would have been okay if the titular symbiote didn’t appear in the first Venom trailer, if perhaps the trailer itself was compelling or interesting, or was character driven to compensate for that. However, the content is all over the place and none of it really gels; so we’ll see what happens when the full story trailer is revealed and we have something more coherent to sink our teeth into.