Nobody knows how the new Star Wars movie is going to pan out by the way, theres a new Star Wars movie coming out, in case you hadnt heard but that didnt stop a mad rush of rabid fans from bringing Fandango to its knees when tickets went on sale last night. Likewise, the fact that nobody much enjoyed J.J. Abrams previous sci-fi extravaganza/franchise-resuscitation effort, 2013s risibly hollow Star Trek Into Darkness, hasnt stopped a majority of folks from believing that his latest effort is going to be the four-quadrant popcorn spectacle of the millennium.
Last night, less than two months from the films premiere, Disney dropped the final trailer for this blockbuster-di-tutti-blockbusters during the middle of an NFC East game, and the brilliant sizzle reel confirms something thats become increasingly clear since that famous cast photo got imaginations racing back in April of 2014: J.J. Abrams is the cinemas greatest hype man since Alfred Hitchcock. You dont need to see The Force Awakens to know that he was the right person to direct it. No one else in Hollywood has displayed such a complete understanding of the idea that marketing is a narrative endeavor, an act of storytelling unto itself. The movie itself could be as flawed as the design of the original Death Star, but this trailer is so good that, for better or worse, you forget that its only selling a movie.
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Consider this the checkmate move of a chess game that the director has been playing with fans for over a year now the coup de grce of a co-ordinated peek-a-boo promotional campaign thats been as oblique as hieroglyphics, as ubiquitous as skywriting, and dense with wonder as any of the non-prequel films themselves. A money-shot supercut that manages to reveal almost nothing about the plot, the clip doubles down on the mythic tone established by the first teaser, its extreme wide shots owing as much to the eye of David Lean as they do the mind of George Lucas. That scale allows each image to function as a myth unto itself, making it easy to overlook how discretely the trailer introduces the films major characters and establishes the relationships between them.
Theres Rey (Daisy Ridley), scavenging for junk on a desert planet defined by the desiccated futurism of the original trilogy. Theres the First Order and its phalanxes of neo-Stormtroopers. Theres Finn (John Boyega), whos disguised among or disenfranchised from the anonymous army of plastic henchmen. Theres evil Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), whose voice modification makes it sound like he delivered all of his dialogue on a prank phone call, and whose hard-on for Darth Vader confirms that Star Wars still boasts the moral ambiguity of a Mighty Ducks movie. (Fuck you, Team Iceland!) And finally, after a quick glimpse of pilot Poe Dont Call Me Llewyn Davis Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Han Solo shows up to fold the previous episodes into the stuff of legend; the most skeptical character from the original trilogy has now been reborn as a resident in-house historian/true believer with a glint in his eye. The Dark Side. The Jedi. Theyre real. Its a gambit that relies as much on Star Wars monolithic place in our culture as it does on the sagas in-world history, making this new chapter as irresistibly compelling to casual fans as it is to cos-players.
Sure, the Chosen One narrative a franchise tradition feels a little played out in this post-Harry Potter world (The Force, its calling to you), and the untethered digital camerawork in the flying sequences reeks of the videogame veneer that Abrams has worked to avoid with his focus on practical effects. But oh, that footageit leaves the indelibleimpression of a galaxy meeting its reckoning.
By the time that title card stretches into view, John Williams music doing as much of the heavy lifting as it always has, were left with a few genuine answers about this project. Abrams gifts as a showrunner, not to mention a showman, have long been established; the jury may still be out on his filmmaking chops, but his genius as a conjurer of wonder is unimpeachable. And though the mans Mystery Box approach to storytelling has been a heated topic of discussion ever since his small-screen co-creation Lost built its entire dramatic structure around slowly unpacking it, the Abrams-produced Cloverfield became the most talked about trailer of 2007 despite the fact it had zero mention of the movies title. This is a guy who sees every project as the reveal of a magic trick that hes been performing from day one.
The knock against Abrams, however, is that the films themselves almost seem like afterthoughts, something thats less important than the eggshell of wonderment he builds around them. But The Force Awakens turns his greatest weakness into the ultimate strength, because for the first time the movie hes been hired to make simply isnt as important as the experience of its unveiling. If this final trailer makes you forget that its just selling a movie, thats only because J.J. Abrams never loses sight of the fact that hes actually selling so much more.
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