John Williams FTW!

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Surrounded by a football game so horrid that Eli Manning must have wished he could just be put into carbon freeze, the new trailer for The Force Awakens was released last night and a million voices…oh, you already heard that joke. Like other Star Wars trailers, this one brought a tear to my eye, because while you can’t trust JJ Abrams, the invented world is so vibrant and the emotional impact still so strong, you want to believe. I was stunned to find this trailer is 2 and a half minutes long…it seemed like it lasted for maybe 45 seconds there was so much to take in. And that is a good thing.

Tickets for showings of SW:TFA also went on sale, crashing websites around the world. Disney has actually taken the world’s most popular film brand and made it even more ruthlessly effective. Mobilizing the clone army of Monday Night Football on ABC (which Disney owns) and ginning up ticket sales for a movie that doesn’t open until December 18th. Brilliant.

If you want some grown up commentary on the trailer, here’s Dave Itzkoff at the Times. For more frame by frame hot takes, Coming Soon has 65 screen grabs, including the one which we all know tore out your heart:

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And the Verge has more analysis. Among the findings: the Millennium Falcon on fire? Finn with the lightsaber Luke lost on Cloud City when Vader cut off his Hand? (I always did wonder what happened to that.)

If you want my breakdown it goes like this: It seems that renegade stormtrooper Finn crash lands on a desert planet and teams up with scavenger Rey, and she had a little droid and then they go have adventures, meeting up with Han Solo and Chewie along the way. Meanwhile, a ban guy named Kylo REn is doing bad things, like playing around with Darth Vader’s charred helmet. And then there is some crying. 

Really, do you need more than that? Who really wants spoilers for this. Go to the movie and find out if you like it. It seems this trilogy picks up in a time when the victory at the Battle of the Death Star is still only a marker in a galaxy at war, and the Empire still has strength. I never really got into the Expanded Universe books that filled noels and comics for 30 years, but it kind of had the feel of…a SF novel. This version of things has the feel of…an action blockbuster. Hopefully there will be no midichlorans or trade agreement negotiations to slow down the adventure.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Actually Monday Night Football airs on ESPN – which Disney still owns. MNF hasn’t aired on ABC since 2005. Which, I would argue coincides with a drop in ratings for all ABC shows, but what do I know?

    I sympathize, MNF was in institution for decades on ABC – but regardless, it aired on ESPN last night.

  2. It’s a terrific trailer. It gave me a chill every time I watched it (which would be three times so far.) And I’ve just ordered my tickets.

    But now, I need to extract myself from the armchair sport of analyzing every frame of the trailer and each square inch of the poster for plot points, character clues and any other tidbit of information about the movie. I’ll actually wait to see all those things revealed in the theatre — when I watch the movie. Imagine that!

    It seems more and more these days the movie itself is an anti-climax to all the hype and expectations surrounding it. By the time it’s released, everybody’s so exhausted by the build-up, they’re already on to the next big thing. Not me. I’ll need to channel the Force and have some discipline! It’ll be tough because I don’t want to completely sequester myself from all my favorite geek and media sites. But I’ll have to view them through squinted eyes, lest I might glimpse some spoiler or speculation which might diminish the full impact of my Star Wars moviegoing experience. Wish me luck!

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