With the early showings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens scheduled for the evening of December 17, we’re barely more than a week away from finally seeing the new film. It’s honestly beginning to look like the resolve of the Disney marketing department is beginning to break down. They’ve been working so hard to keep things under wraps for months, and while the new Chinese trailer might not actually spoil anything at all, and even if it does it’s pretty minor, it certainly seems to be implying that they can’t help but show off new stuff. But it’s so cool. Still, potential spoilers incoming. You have been warned. Check it out below. The actual trailer starts about 15 seconds in.
In the opening sequence, we get the attack on Jakku that we’ve seen quite a bit of in the previous trailers. New stuff here includes some additional conversation between Rey and BB-8, including the droid apparently telling her that where it comes from is "classified," which all of the sudden makes the little one significantly more mysterious than previously. The next bit is a scene we’ve seen before, with Rey and Finn running from the attack of The First Order in need of a pilot. Previously, when Rey said they had a pilot it was implied that she was talking about herself. Here, the pilot in question is actually our favorite loveable rogue Han Solo. This could be a misdirection thanks to clever editing but if it isn’t, that means that Solo is already on Jakku someplace and is familiar to Rey. Begin rampant speculation now.
The second half of the trailer then follows lots of aerial battles, a female voice over we haven’t heard before, who sounds like Gwendoline Christie (but who can be sure?), and the closest that the lightsaber fight between Finn and Kylo Ren has come to actually beginning on screen. Interesting bits here include the Millennium Falcon apparently making an unscheduled landing in the snow, and the fact that Kylo Ren is clearly not wearing his helmet in the fight with Finn, and it looks a lot more like the back of Adam Driver’s head than it does Mark Hamill’s. If anyone is still holding on to that theory.
While the trailer appears to give stuff away, all it really does is create more questions. The biggest question of all, of course, is how can Rey understand BB-8? Luke Skywalker needed his X-Wing computer to translate R2-D2 for him, even in the third movie, when they’d been together for years. BB-8 apparently just showed up and already Rey knows what all the beeps and boops mean. What’s going on? Maybe it’s just me.
As excited as we are for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, please Lucasfilm, keep the spoilers locked down. We’ve got a week ago and you’ve done so well. We don’t actually want to know the answers, but some of us have to write about the news when it happens. Do you feel adequately ill-prepared for Episode VII or do you wish you knew less than you did right now?
