Everything you need to know about the latest amazing Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer
This is a proper Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer. Not a teaser, not a montage of characters reacting, explosions and vehicles in a galaxy far, far away. This is an honest-to-goodness, plot-filled trailer.
Taking only what we've watched so far in trailers, what the actors have said of their roles and the movie's recent theatrical poster, it's now possible to piece together some of what we'll see on Dec. 17, when The Force Awakens arrives in theaters.
Let's see what we can figure out.
THE STORY
Given the three trailers released thus far, I think we can reconstruct the beginning of The Force Awakens.
The trailer begins with a question, though who's asking it is unclear.
"Who are you?" a woman's voice asks.
"I'm no one," Rey answers, and she seems to believe it. We probably shouldn't.
We see Rey on Jakku, the desert planet that isn't Tatooine. She's a scavenger, as the actress Daisy Ridley described her a few months ago. At the beginning of this trailer, she's exploring the hulking wreck of the Star Destroyer that we saw in the first Force Awakens trailer.
"We discover Rey on the desert planet of Jakku," said Daisy Ridley, the actress who plays Rey, describing her character at Star Wars Celebration this year. "She is a scavenger in a ship graveyard and she is completely self-sufficient — she does everything for herself — and very solitary. Until she meets another character, and an adventure begins."
That other character is Finn, played by John Boyega.
The trailer makes the course of events clear: Finn is a Stormtrooper, piloting a TIE Fighter. There's an explosion in space, and he lands his busted spacecraft on Jakku. That explains why he appears terrified and breathing heavily, in Stormtrooper armor, in the very first shot of the very first trailer, released last November.
So Rey is from Jakku, and some series of events leads Finn there, too.
As Obi-Wan Kenobi pointed out to Han Solo in A New Hope, a TIE Fighter is "a short-range fighter," which means it needs a base of operations. The fleeting shot of a starfighter exploding in space in this trailer also shows a Star Destroyer in the distance.
Base of operations? Check.
"I was raised to do one thing," Finn says, presumably referring to being a Stormtrooper for the reconstituted Empire. But he's lost his faith. "But I've got nothing to fight for," he says.
Why Finn and Rey become partners remains a mystery. But when they're together, TIE fighters begin to attack. We've seen them running from explosions in three trailers now, but it's clear from the latest that it's the TIE fighters behind those explosions.
Note the TIE Fighter, hurried and blurry against Jakku's sky
Meanwhile, Chewbacca and Han Solo make their way to Jakku, too. There they find the Millennium Falcon, as we learned in The Force Awakens' second trailer, earlier this year.
We now know that Chewie and Han find Finn and Rey, too. And that leads to the best moment in the trailer.
"There are stories about what happened," Rey says to Han. They're standing in the Millennium Falcon.
"It's true," Han says. "All of it. The Dark Side. The Jedi. They're real."
If Han has to tell Rey that Jedi are real, then we have to explain how the reality of the omnipresent, oppressive Empire has faded from memory. It could be that Jakku is like Tatooine in more than one way — an Outer Rim planet, drifting so far out in the backwater that its inhabitants don't really know what happened on the other side of the galaxy decades ago.
It could be that, from Rey's perspective, Jakku is the whole universe.
And it's likely no coincidence that this new generation of Star Wars heroes and villains were born into a universe without the Empire. They don't know what it was like to suffocate in the iron grip of the Emperor and Darth Vader. History has become legend and myth.
But the more interesting part of this scene is what it says about Han Solo.
When we met him in A New Hope, he was an unbeliever. He dismissed Obi-Wan's ways as "hokey" and called the Jedi an "ancient religion," before saying he'd never seen anything to convince him that the Force was real.
In The Force Awakens, it's Han Solo's role to tell the unbelievers the truth — that magic is real. That is a character arc, earned in the original trilogy.
Presumably, Han's soliloquy is enough to convince Finn and Rey that they should follow the now-old Scoundrel. The looming Star Destroyer and the patrolling TIE Fighters outside probably don't hurt, either.
As we've seen since the first trailer, the Falcon gets running again and makes its escape, dodging TIE fighters within the hulking wreck of a Star Destroyer and above the sands of Jakku.
That, if what we've seen in three trailers holds true, is how Star Wars: The Force Awakens begins.
Of course, it leaves many unanswered questions, too. Why did Chewie and Han lose the Falcon? Why is there wreckage of a Star Destroyer and an X-wing in the sands of Jakku? What brought a new Star Destroyer to the planet?
LOCATIONS
There are several locations, some of which it's safe to name.
Jakku is the desert planet that brings our heroes together.
There's space, of course, and hyperspace, that the Falcon flies through.
Hyperspace, Star Wars style
If we've got the timing right, the next location the Falcon flies to is a lush green and blue planet, reminiscent of Endor from Return of the Jedi; Kashyyyk, the Wookie homeworld we saw a bit of in Revenge of the Sith; and Yavin 4, where the rebel base was located in A New Hope.
It seems to be the location of the temple adorned with flags that BB-8 (Rey's droid), Han, Finn and Rey enter. It's worth pointing out that Yavin 4 also had temples, so this is nothing new in the Star Wars universe.
A battle takes place here, too, with more TIE fighters and modern X-wings dogfighting over forests and lakes.
It also ties into a shot from the second trailer, where we saw Poe Dameron and a flock of X-wings flying low over a body of water. In this trailer, we also see that from the perspective of the Stormtroopers they're coming to attack.
And there is Sullust, the planet you can also visit in Star Wars Battlefront. Those who played the beta know that it's a craggy, charcoal gray planet filled with jutting rocks. And that may be where Luke Skywalker, who appears as briefly in this trailer as he did in the last, is hiding out.
There's another new shot, presumably on Jakku, that appears to be a continuation from the first teaser trailer. Last November, we saw fleeting glimpses of Stormtroopers huddled together in what looks like a dropship.
In this trailer, we see Stormtroopers leaving a drop ship.
The final location might be very, very interesting.
There appear to be two distinct battles involving X-wings. We covered the lush green planet above. The other is the planet covered in mountains and snow. It's where the reconstituted Empire holds its Nuremberg Rally, which reappears in this trailer.
Given that its chief distinguishing characteristic is snow, it also appears to be the planet where Finn and Kylo Ren square off in the woods.
But given the few shots we see of the battle above the planet and an as yet completely unexplained part of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens poster, it looks like this planet … may not be a planet.
Look at the surface. Those trenches are, of course, reminiscent of the first Star Wars movie, where Luke Skywalker uses the Force inside a trench to save the day. But, of course, in that movie, those trenches weren't part of a planet. They were part of the Death Star, an armored space station the size of a small moon.
Look at the structure on the right of the frame. It's not a natural formation.
Look at the trenches.
Now look at the upper right corner of the poster.
What if those trenches aren't just dug into the surface of a planet? What if that final planet is a planet in disguise? What if it's a Death Star in disguise — and, perhaps, the reason that the Empire was able to reconstitute itself?
THE CASE OF THE MISSING LIGHTSABER
At the end of Revenge of the Sith, Obi-Wan Kenobi takes Anakin Skywalker's blue-bladed lightsaber from him, after, you know, chopping him in half.
Almost two decades later, in A New Hope, he gives that lightsaber to Luke Skywalker.
In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke loses his lightsaber, after Darth Vader cuts off the hand holding it.
Luke reappears in Return of the Jedi with a new lightsaber that he built himself. This one has a green blade.
In the second trailer for The Force Awakens, someone hands a lightsaber to someone who might be Princess Leia. It is very clearly Luke's lightsaber.
In this trailer, Finn stands in snowy woods wielding a lightsaber. It is very clearly Luke's lightsaber.
THE MYSTERIOUS RED LIGHT
There are two very rapid shots, not far from each other, but easy to disconnect. One takes place on the bridge of what looks to be a Star Destroyer — or at least some kind of structure with Imperial design, given the telltale trapezoidal windows.
The other takes place on a planet, in the midst of an explosion.
The link between the two seems to be the mysterious glowing red light. It may be that the forces of evil are bombing somewhere with this red light.
And red, as all good Star Wars fans know, is the color of the Dark Side of the Force — like the lightsabers that the Sith wield.
THE EXPLOSION
If we look at the shape of the windows, we can surmise that this explosion happens on an Imperial ship. But that's devoid of context, and that makes it difficult to say more.
The best part of this image, though, is the MSE-6 Mouse Droid in the bottom center of the frame.
CAPTAIN PHASMA
There still isn't much to say about Captain Phasma, played by Gwendoline Christie, but she does make a brief appearance.
Her location here is distinguished by fire. She might be on the hunt for Luke, who's also among fire.
KYLO REN
Kylo Ren is a bad guy. He's a zealot. And he's young enough for it to be plausible to think that he has no living memory of the Empire. He looks back and sees glory, not oppression.
"Nothing will stand in our way," he says. "I will finish what you started."
He's speaking to Darth Vader's mangled helmet. That's no good.
SOMETHING VERY BAD
There's no way to know what, exactly, is going on here. But our heroes, who appear to be on the lush green planet, have their hands behind their heads, which is never a good sign. And judging by the look on Han's face, it's very, very bad.
Active Discussions
Polygon Quarterly: Not for the Shareholders but for the Games
in Off-topic by sum_guy
Polygon forums close this Friday
in Off-topic by Chris Plante
Looking for more people to write Plight!
in Off-topic by Prinny
Welcome to the >new< forums!
in Off-topic by Prinny
What are you reading manga right now?
in Off-topic by lee87645312