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Ranking The 11 Shots From The Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer

After weeks of speculation, the first footage for J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens is now available for viewing. Was it worth the hype? Did it make us turn from the comfortingly dismissive cynicism of the Dark side toward the fanboyish optimism of the Light? The consensus: yeah, pretty much. Which is a little surprising, considering how little of a trailer it actually is. Unless Abrams plans on breaking up every other shot with a black insert, just half of the 88-second trailer has any actual footage in it. At only 11 shots long, is there much of anything that we can infer about the new movie’s plot, or how good it’s going to be?

1) New Millennium, Same Millennium Falcon

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Nostalgia Bait: 99/100

Neat New Stuff: 60/100

There it is. There’s the reason this movie is going to make at least half a billion dollars next year. This trailer could have been a two-second shot of the Falcon’s exhaust port, and that would have been enough. Instead, the triumphant closing shot of the trailer shows the old girl off in all her glory, 31 years after we last saw her in Return of the Jedi.

The inverted pan around the Millennium Falcon mid-flight makes a case for the camera trickery allowed by computer-generated effects (while showing off the Falcon’s new satellite dish), and the slight rearrangement on Williams’ classic main theme reinforces the feeling of “what’s old is new again.”

Why is the Falcon engaging Tiefighters this close to Tatooine’s surface? Impossible to tell. What is this movie even going to be about? Doesn’t matter. Star Wars: The Force Awakens has the ship, and the music. For a lot of people, that’ll be enough to get their butts into a theatre seat come December of next year.

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