I’m a bit late stepping up to the plate with this review of The Force Awakens, as by now, everyone and their grandmother will have seen the second teaser trailer for the next Star Wars movie at least twenty times…I have, so I’ll keep what I have to say about it short.
…actually that’s just a Star Wars pun, as I really loved the teaser. I felt something when I watched that teaser. Although we can all be tricked into being excited about a film or TV show these days, even someone as cynical as me, but this is what JJ Abrams is really good at — He knows how to work those inner feelings in us. When you hack apart many of the shows and movies JJ has done, you can see he always jams his work full of things that immediately resonate emotionally with his audience.
The first teaser was full of stuff that resembled things we loved from the original Star Wars movie. Visual analogs were offered that called back to something we had good feelings about. The classic X-Wing, Stormtroopers and ‘that’ Lightsaber…all tweaked, instead of being the same as they once were, they echo like a ‘Borg-like’ collective feeling of ‘good’ Déjà vu. The first teaser even gave us good feelings of positivity, although it didn’t show any of the actors from the original film series, we knew that they was involved.
Now this new teaser has gone further with that ‘calling back’ to the original series of films. Again, many things are slightly altered to be different, but yet the same. It’s as if JJ is winking and nodding at the audience with this teaser. “Hey, geek-boy, remember those good times we had? Remember that Tie Fighter?” It’s as if every frame has been composed to expressly tie elements with the previous stories of the original trilogy, including that voiceover from Luke Skywalker, and that awesome appearance of Han and Chewie that harked back to that “classic PR” shot from A New Hope.
As for me, I am truly moved by it, in the most honest sense. There are many things this teaser trailer does to mitigate the “bad PR” of the prequels, and although the giant corporate entity of Disney, that’s running it as a movie franchise, much in the same way they have done with Marvel. They’ve cheered us up, and even teared up this fan after seeing familiar things that have triggered fond childhood almost ‘pavlovian’ memories.
Can this film really deliver, and not be distracted by all JJ’s nods and winks that come through in this teaser…I do hope so, as I want to be in the geek zone with this movie, and don’t want to be knocked out by remembering the other films. Thankfully this is my only slightly ‘optimistic’ concern about this film, as it seems better suited to JJ than Star Trek, and I can only assume that means this film will be as good as 2009’s Star Trek was at playing with our feelings, if not better…“I’ve a ‘good’ feeling about this”
Geek Carl 