by Anthony Colucci and Elissa Hill

Creating a trailer for a movie is one of the hardest steps of the production process.

Effectively condensing the plot of a two-hour feature into a two-minute summary while leaving a sense of mystery as a sales pitch to an audience is no easy task. It must be exciting without seeming all-encompassing of the movie’s best parts and simultaneously generate suspense and leave viewers intrigued enough to watch the full-length film.

The selected clips in the trailer for HBO’s “Paterno” certainly delivered on creating intrigue with clips that caused waves of speculation about just how hard the film would hit Penn State.

The first words spoken by an actual character in the trailer are by Scott Paterno, asking his father, “Did you know about Jerry?” Someone accuses Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter Sara Ganim of telling lies to make money. Joe Paterno incoherently screams out of frustration. He also touts how much he means to the university, flashing his perceived invincibility.

But the film itself didn’t deliver on this anticipated roar of controversy.

Scott Paterno’s dramatic question appeared as if it would be the focus of the film. Instead, he casually and awkwardly asks his father if he knew any extra details at the end of a meeting with Penn State football branding director Guido D’Elia.

The person accusing Ganim of lying as a reporter turns out to be someone she’s temporarily staying with in State College, not anyone from the Paterno camp.

The memorable clip of Paterno angrily groaning in the trailer seemed to represent his response to the scandal but actually occurs days after he was fired and in the middle of a dispute between his sons.

And the sound bite of Paterno claiming to be untouchable? It was from a flashback of Paterno speaking years before the film took place, when administrators first suggested he consider ending his reign as head coach.

The trailer set the tone for a film that would point fingers, dramatize, and fill in the blanks. Despite the film’s dramatic ending, fictional details, and invasion into the Paterno household, it falls short of the defined stance it seemed to take. The clips made for an engaging, thought-provoking trailer, but not one that fits the film’s lukewarm storyline.

“Paterno” denies any semblance of context throughout much of its plot line, much less the “journalistic” and factual context director Barry Levinson promised (though it’s worth noting this isn’t at all intended to be a documentary).

Rather than digging deeper into Paterno’s motivations or perceived moral obligation, the film relies on public opinion in its surface-level assessment of coach’s culpability in the Sandusky scandal.

All he cared about was football. Penn Staters worshiped Paterno. No one cared about, or even remembered, the victims.

Media accounts of the scandal and what happened after it broke run the gamut, and Levinson capitalized on them as such. But it’s a story unserved regardless, as sparking discourse around the coach’s guilt, or lack thereof, is a cause long entombed. On either side of the argument, not many people stand to change their views at this point.

Even so, Levinson and co. attempt to keep at bay their own opinions on Paterno’s culpability, and are largely successful — that is, until the end of the film, when journalist Sara Ganim receives a call at her Patriot-News desk.

The voice on the other end says he grew up in State College and that he told Paterno about what he implies was his own sexual abuse at the hands of Sandusky, during the summer of 1976. In reality, a single line in an insurance lawsuit revealed the 1976 allegation long after the peak of the scandal and its fallout, and the claim was never litigated.

As presented, this call is perhaps the movie’s most pointed accusation to Paterno’s culpability, and feels out of place in the otherwise realistic (albeit dramatized) storyline, especially alongside an awkward scene where a still-84-year-old Paterno flashes back to his son Jay’s childhood and jumps into a pool with him and a crowd of other children — arguably the strangest component of the movie.

It also stands to show HBO hasn’t been seriously working on “Paterno” since it announced the project was “ramping up” in 2014, as these court documents were only just released in May 2016. Nearly two years later, we finally have a film to watch.

“Paterno” ultimately isn’t as damning of Joe or the family as anticipated, but it fails to impart any new perspective on the events it portrays.

Maybe there’s nothing left to be said.