Sean Penn has a pretty good record as a director, with films such as The Indian Runner and Into the Wild under his belt. However, he seems to have seriously blotted his copybook with his fifth feature, the war romance The Last Face, which attracted derisive reviews when it premiered at Cannes in May. Now the first trailer is out, the wider public can begin to make their own judgments on it.

Starring Javier Bardem and Charlize Theron as conflict-zone medics in Africa, The Last Face in trailer form already looks like a wildly overheated melodrama, with a clear case of white saviourism. It might be hard, from this alone, to discern the full ramifications of what our reviewer Benjamin Lee described as Penn’s “unbelievably crass decisions at every conceivable turn”, but the opening voiceover – “When I thought of him I was there in a way I wasn’t when I wasn’t thinking of him” – gets things off to a promisingly klutzy, poorly articulated start. Penn has conjured up some striking images, certainly, but there’s little to suggest that The Last Face can hold a candle to, say, Beasts of No Nation, as an exploration of the price of civil war in sub-Saharan Africa.