Color me giddy.
Trailers do not a movie make, but this looks like it might have the juice to make me forget the prequels:
Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer (Official)
I cannot even begin to explain how psyched I am for this.
I cannot even begin to explain how psyched I am for this.
Tod Kelly
Tod is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He is also serves as Executive Producer and host of both the 7 Deadly Sins Show at Portland's historic Mission Theatre and 7DS: Pants On Fire! at the White Eagle Hotel & Saloon. He is a regular inactive for Marie Claire International and the Daily Beast, and is currently writing a book on the sudden rise of exorcisms in the United States. Follow him on Twitter.
Oh my, yes.Report
Me three.Report
A part of me loves the idea of “adultifying” the mythology, telling a story with a darker edge to it. (Like Empire Strikes Back was darker than the rest.) And a part of me wants to see the grand mythological archetypes straight out of Campbell.
But, can we talk here?
As much as I’d like to say I’m done with goofy C3P0 and cute-and-heroic R2D2, there are elements of the Star Wars stories aimed at children that should be aimed at children. The droid-on-a-globe is kid stuff and there probably ought to be some of that in play.
We don’t need to see a careworn Han Solo recovering from alcoholism; we need to see a charming scoundrel still up to his old tricks and Senator Leia pretending to turn a blind eye to it until he makes too much of a political mess and then she cleans it up. And we need that stuff in short doses, because the story needs to be about the new generation of heroes and villains.Report
One of the most interesting fan complaints I hear is about the Zac Snyder DC comics movies as being too dark, somber, and taking themselves too seriously. DC comics are supposed to be light and airy and fun according to the fans especially Superman.
Yet Syder’s movies do extremely well and continued to get made. This reveals some possibilities.
1. The fans don’t realize that Hollywood only cares about your money and they go to the movies anyway.
2. The number of people who like the adult turns are vastly greater than the number who want Superman to be light and airy.Report
George Lucas consulted with childhood psychologists when he was making the original Star Wars trilogy. Yoda was only put in the Return of the Jedi because childhood psychologists told Lucas that was the only way kids will accept that Darth Vader is Luke’s father.
http://www.cracked.com/article_22906_6-dumb-aspects-original-star-wars-trilogy-you-forgot.html
Like much else in fandom, the people who said Star Wars as children did not exactly come to see it as a fond part of their childhood but rather expected it to grow with them just like comic books.Report
It is Christmas; Harper got landslide out of office in Canada in a Liberal sweep. The home country has gone home to my dear old Grits. I’m chuffed!Report
I don’t know which surprises me more, the resurgence of the Liberals or the relative collapse of the NDP. I’m not surprised the CPC lost, but the return of the Liberal Party should give hope and solace to every down-and-out party anywhere. (Well. Except Russia.)Report
So you’re saying that all a party has to do to retake the head of goverment is to nominate the son of a former head of goverment?Report
Well it helps if the fellow is charismatic and politically capable. It also helps if his opponent has so enraged the liberal side of the electorate that they’ll vote en masse to throw the bum out or so annoyed his own people that they form splinter parties to discomfort him. It wasn’t the son of a former head of government that unseated the Tories in Alberta.Report
It wasn’t the Liberals, either…Report
Nope, it’s very obvious the electorate’s predominant communicated mandate was “Tories out” as I noted before the Liberals got in mainly because Harper attacked the NDP in Quebec. It’s entirely possible the NDP could have gotten the win had Harper gone after the Liberals instead.Report
It doesn’t surprise me. The NDP has moved to the right to try and be a “grown up party” poaching and nibbling into historically Liberal policy territory. The Liberals have mostly stood pat in the center left with some wobbles left and right. Basically the left side of the electorate was ready to vote for whichever of the two parties looked like it could unseat Harper. The last couple of elections have had severe left wing vote splitting so the voters were in a really strategic frame of mine and bandwagoned onto whichever of the two parties that looked like it could take down Harper.
Harper took aim at the NDP in Quebec with a hard line against Muslims and certain Muslim behaviors (The Quebecois are especially sensitive to these lines of attack). This actually worked, it depressed the NDP in Quebec. What the Tories hadn’t counted on was that it made the Liberals rise instead of those voters moving to the Tories, it gave the Liberals an in (multiculturalism is a big Liberal policy), and when the Liberals looked to be on the ascent a lot of the left side of the electorate decided to simply vote Liberal to avoid splitting the vote.
I suspect that if Harper had aimed for the Grits then the NDP could well have risen and then gotten a similar bandwagon effect. Though the Grits have deep historic roots in Quebec, Ontario and Atlantic Canada so it was pretty easy for them to resurge as well.Report
I have to say that, while a lot of people bang on and on about the evils of two-partyism, I don’t remotely envy anyone in a multi-party system the constant fretting over the threat of vote-splitting among parties of vaguely similar political cast of mind. (I realize they will always come back at that with all the non-negotiable reasons why their party simply must be a different party and field candidates that compete with other candidates of vaguely similar cast of mind, and often they’ll be persuasive reasons.)
Especially given my political cast of mind.Report
On its own, this isn’t enough to give me (a new) hope. The prequels were dreadful, and Abrams’ record (most relevantly in reviving Trek) is mixed at best.
However, Fury Road showed that it’s not always impossible to recapture the magic, and my six-year-old is VERY excited about this, so I am looking forward to taking him.Report
Yes, Abrams’ second Trek film was a disappointment, but not the first, not in my mind.
And the second only really ended up bad because of a couple of bad decisions. Most of it works quite well.
The only recurring issues I’ve had with JJ Abrams are his love of subjective camera in fight scenes – I feel this has no place in Star Wars – and his unconcern with, you know, making things make sense.Report
I’ll take an Abrams “that didn’t make sense” over a Star Wars prequels “that didn’t make sense” any day, though. Those movies were a hot mess. Within hours of leaving the theater after the Phantom Menace, I couldn’t have written a plot summary if you’d offered me $500 to do it.Report
Whatever Abrams’ storytelling tics and shortcomings, at least he never tried to kick off his highly-anticipated genre fare with a breakdown in galactic trade negotiations.Report
I will add my voice to the rest of the internet and state that I am very excited about this film. I hated the prequels and generally moved away from any Star Wars fandom, but these trailers have hooked me right back in. everything they have shown me about the film so far (tone, characters, effects) makes me think this will make most Star Wars fans happy (unless you don’t like having the lead be a black guy. In that case, there is a 4Chan board waiting for your screaming).Report
My God, you people need to grow up.Report
Earlier today someone posted a video of people filming their kids watching the moment when Darth Vader tells Luke that he is his father, people were talking about how funny and amazing it was, and all I could think about it was, “Dear God, there are a lot of people who film their children watching movies.”Report
@chris No lie: I just watched the trailer again with my 9 month year old daughter, and she was thrilled. She laughed and clapped the whole time, and she doesn’t even know what a Star Wars is!
I should have recorded it. I could have been internet famous.Report
Nine-month olds are YouTube gold.Report
Do you suggest watching people hit balls with sticks instead? That seems like a grown-up kind of activity.Report
There was more drama in the 7th inning of the recent Bluejays-Rangers game than in all six Star Wars movies combined. And way more laughs.Report
I think baseball would seem more grown-up if runners had to “freeze” when tagged.Report
Or if, in order for a batter to advance to first, the first base coach had to yell, “Red Rover, Red Rover, let _____ come over!”Report
@mike-schilling
If for some reason you wanted to watch sports, why on earth would you watch one of your bizarre novelty sports? Basically only one country plays a them, you might as well watch games being played in someone’s back yard.Report
Only one country plays baseball? You’ve apparently never heard of Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Japan, Korea, or Taiwan. Even the Canadians seem to really enjoy baseball in the 2 months that it’s warm enough to be outside without risking near immediate frost bite.
Meanwhile, New Zealanders are fond of a bunch of sports no one outside of the Commonwealth even knows exist.Report
Football (as in Soccer to you yanks)?Report
Interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed in the last few years: as soccer has become more popular in the U.S., I hear more and more people here referring to it as football, as long as in context it’s clear that the speaker is referring to association football, not American football.Report
That is interesting, I wouldn’t have noted it as spectator sports are alien to me.Report
That’s because, with no tradition of our own to fall back on, US fans have taken to stealing European traditions out of whole cloth. Scarves, songs, drinking heavily while marching to games, announcers with received BBC accents, calling teams based in the midwest “Real” and “Sporting”, and unironic use of terms like “pitch” and “football”.
Sigh. I remember when it was just pretentious bores like me who watched “Soccer Made in Germany” on PBS who did that kind of thing.
I think the way Japanese fans of the J-League go about things is better, in a way. It’s all twisted in a funhouse mirror in much the same way Japanese baseball is, but it works – that’s what Japan does.Report
If only MLS were good football. Why can’t we copy that European tradition?
Thank god for Fox Sorts 1 and 2, NBC Soccer and Sports Extra, and BeIn Sports. They’ve really helped me quit American football cold turkey.Report
Gawd I hate the FC/Real/United crap.Report
Those three at least make some sense, but the Sporting? What are they trying to do, capture the American contingent of Primeira Liga fans?Report
Real makes me laugh….Royal Salt Lake…wtf?Report
The King of Spain was always fond of Utah.Report
Wasn’t the King of Spain last seen in Toronto?
Report
No, Boston.
https://youtu.be/1c_vxO9VbvYReport
With his buddy Raoul.
https://youtu.be/329YWyobyPsReport
Really?Report
I actually take back the United one. That one is okay (as far as singular noun team names go). It’s probably the Washington team name that annoys me the least, actually.Report
New Zealanders are fond of a bunch of sports no one outside of the Commonwealth even knows exist.
Hey now, competitive sheep-shearing and Hobbit-hoisting are fast-growing sports!Report
It’s not New Zealand, but I recently got sucked down an internet rabbit hole that took me to this image. You’ll notice that there are a few countries with unique favorite sports (Mongolians really love wrestling!), but there is one small country where the favorite sport is a sport that no one outside of that country has even heard of. Can you spot it?
I ended up watching many videos about said sport, and the related and almost equally popular sport with nearly identical rules except that it’s played with sticks. I need to find a television channel that will allow me to follow both of these sports, and I need to find it soon.Report
The link isn’t working, but is it the Afghan one with the dead goat?Report
Should be working now.
And no, Gaelic football, which is just plain silly. Check out a video, in which you’ll see grown men running with a ball, throwing it either to the ground or bouncing it up off one of their feet every few steps. The related sport is hurling, which is Gaelic football but with heavy sticks that can be used either to hit the ball or to bludgeon your opponent to death, depending on the game situation.Report
The related sport is hurling, which is Gaelic football but
first consuming a case of Guinness.Report
Dude, if you’ve never watched either of those sports, I highly recommend doing so immediately (youtube is filled with videos, including helpful explanatory ones).
I don’t know how half the players aren’t killed every season in hurling. As for Gaelic football, as far as I can tell, it was created by 10 year olds trying to guess at the rules of rugby from a single photo, and that is meant as a compliment.Report
Kind of apropos to this – people today look at soccer and rugby and think (quite reasonably) that the games split when one side decided they wanted to run with the ball and the other didn’t.
And that’s a big part of it – but the immediate split, the straw that broke the camel’s back – was hacking. Rugby supporters felt that it was a big part of the game to be able to kick people in the shins whether they had the ball or not. The guys who would form the Association believed in only being able to shin someone who was actually dribbling with the ball(1).
(1) The bit about falling over, rolling five times, clutching one’s shin and howling whenever a tackler got within a yard of you was added later.Report
They serve great food at buzkashi matches. Verified fact.Report
I imagine the goat is fully-tenderized by the time the game is finished.Report
Buzkashi. That was the first thing I thought of, too.
Damn you, P.J. O’Rourke!Report
@chris
I broke my rule about avoiding everything to do with the Rugby World Cup to look this up, but there were 20 countries with teams in the Rugby World Cup, half of which are Commonwealth countries and there were qualifiers to narrow the number of teams down to 20. By contrast, the list of countries you came up with for baseball would be too small to make a World Cup for baseball feasible.Report
Those are just the countries where baseball is the first or second most popular sport. Baseball is also big in much of the rest of South and Central America and East Asia. Basically the entire western hemisphere plays baseball, as do a billion plus people in Asia.
The winners of the last baseball World Cup were the Netherlands, which are in not in any of those areas, though admittedly much of their talent comes from islands over here.Report
18 countries have participated in the world baseball championship over the past 10 years,from every continent except Antarctica. (And that only because Ron Cey was too old.)Report
OK, I’ll admit that’s more than I was expecting.Report
Along with teams that have failed to make it in qualifiers, including New Zealand.Report
No wonder James K is bitter.Report
@mike-schilling Don’t you have some kids you need to tell to get off your lawn?Report
“Get off my lawn! And go find something worthwhile to watch, with decent acting at least semi-plausible dialogue, and something to recommend it besides special effects! And parsec is a fucking unit of distance!”Report
Right on!Report
This. That line of dialogue has always bothered me.Report
And now, the real Right-leaning M. Schilling comes out . . .Report
The fact that these trailers are resonating so well supports my belief that a lot of these beloved sci fi or fantasy movies are very much about the look and feel of the world they build. Aside from the fact that the Star Wars prequels were a confused mess, they also built a world that felt completely different from the original Star Wars world. It was unnatural and didn’t feel real. It’s very difficult to make up a new universe from scratch, and the original Star Wars movies built one that, for as strange as it was, hung together very naturally. Something weird could pop onto the screen and you’d think, “Yeah, of course that exists in that world.” I think that’s a big part of the appeal. Stripping that away and starting from scratch for Episodes I-III meant that they had to hit it out of the park if they were going to make it work.
The Mad Max series is another example. For as bizarre and outrageous as it was, the world made sense and drew us in. The stories were interesting (although I honestly don’t even remember what Beyond Thunderdome was about even though I remember a lot of the movie vividly) but not amazing. But it’s one of those worlds that is so weird and compelling that you’d probably watch a reality show set there, even if it was just following around the guy who fixes busted up battle cars. Fury Road maintained continuity of that look and feel and the rules governing how the world worked, so making a movie that didn’t leave us all feeling disappointed was a lot less of a stretch.
Important lesson for filmmakers: If you’re going to reboot, remake, extend, or otherwise try to cash in on a beloved movie franchise whose primary appeal was a cool look and feel in an interesting setting, you should probably keep those things. They’re the lightning in a bottle that made them stand out. Starting from scratch with those things is taking the gas cap and seatbelts off of a Ferrari and trying to design a totally different car around them. You will probably not produce what your customers are expecting.Report
I endorse this commentReport
This is so not on my care list.
Can’t someone make a new version of Nostromo?Report
Or Duck Soup?Report
You mean Prometheus?Report
My assistant teacher is a Trekkie. Or something. She went to ComicCon. She’s helping me learn the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. This is the former… yes?Report
Yes.Report
JJ Abrams is very good, but somehow it always seems like he plays it just a little safe, preventing his work from going over the top into awesome.
The trailers have felt very JJ Abrams-y to me. That’s a good thing. But it’s not a giddy-making thing for me. But I remain hopeful that he knocks it out of the park.Report