Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

My initial impressions of Teaser #2 for Star Wars: The Force Awakens

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When I’m writing this I’ve seen Teaser #2 for Star Wars: The Force Awakens just three times, slowly play-pausing my way through a forth viewing. I write this before listening to The Incomparable #243: Find My Lightsaber. I’m really looking forward to hearing what Jason, John, Serenity and Dan thinks about it and I’m sure it will influence my opinion as well, but I do want to write down my impressions before being affected by somebody else’s.

I’m trying to stay spoiler-free for this movie, so I’ll only watch the teasers and trailers. That means that this far all I’ve seen i the first teaser and this one.

The Teaser #1 was kind of cool but also seemed very generic for a action/adventure movie in 2015. The short scene with The Millennium Falcon flying was awesome though.

This new teaser gives me a whole lot more. It opens with well known Star Wars music by John Williams and a really wide shot of a desert (Tatooine, I presume). The music gave me instant goose-bumps but I did think the matte-painting looked kind of cheap. This was my internal dialog as I watched it: ”Oh well, maybe that will be fixed before the actual release of OH MY GOD, IS THAT A CRASHED STAR DESTROYER!!!!

And then we hear the voice of Luke Skywalker. We see Darth Vader’s burnt out helmet, we see a ”classic looking” lightsaber and most importantly we actually see Luke patting R2-D2 with his prosthetic hand.

You have that power (the force) too.

Who?? Who has that power? OMG!

By this point in the trailer I’m on the edge of my seat as more of Williams classic Star Wars music showers me. Then there are X-Wings and then a quick cut of what I assume is a ”Dark Jedi” och ”Sith” or something swinging the lightsaber with the hand guard that we saw in the first teaser. My adrenaline is pumping wild by this point.

Then there is chaos, and another shot of the Dark Jedi and then my favorite shot so far, the one of the stormtroopers infront of the giant red imperial symbol. This shot feels a lot like something from a Nazi Germany propaganda video. Then more chaos, new actors, TIE fighters and who is this shine stormtrooper that marches in slow motion?

Now I’m really pumped and then suddenly we see the Millennium Falcon again in a beautiful chase with a TIE fighter. And then fade to black. And then we hear Han Solo’s voice. ”Chewie…”, the picture fades in and we see Han and Chewie, ”we’re home.”

In the second view I literary cried at this point.

I promised myself early on, when we first got the word of a new Star Wars movie, that I should get my hopes up too high. Now that seems impossible. There is just so much that this trailer gets right. Judging by what we see here, maybe there’ll be more focus on the original Star Wars actors than I’d thought before. In some ways I don’t want that. I want to get to know new characters and I don’t want the movie to just be a service to nostalgic old fans like me. But I can’t deny the fact that I cried when I saw Han and Chewie. These are my childhood heroes and soon I will see them in a movie theater again, in a movie that I haven’t seen before, a movie that might actually not suck!

The teaser says very little about what the movie is about but I like everything I see in it. Every image seems well thought out. I like the tweaked design of the stormtroopers and the X-Wings.

Maybe it’s just me, but some parts of the teaser makes me think about the Dark Empire comic book, a comic book that I didn’t like at all. The crashed Star Destroyer and Luke and R2 sitting alone in the light of a bonfire are very reminiscent of that comic book. I didn’t like the book itself but there are some elements from it, like a Star Destroyer crashing on a planet and Luke and R2 alone on a foreign world, that is very appealing to me.

There is also the thing I’ve thought about since the first teaser, the thing that I can’t shake out of my head. What if this new Dark Lord is in fact Luke Skywalker?