After delighting moviegoers last year, Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens has arrived on home video. The film’s been pored over thoroughly by online obsessives, and now you’ll get to do the same thing from the comfort of your living room (once you’ve gotten over simply watching it, and the stack of Blu-ray extras just for fun). With your feet up and your remote handy, here are ten moments from the film you may want to pause and have a think about. Yes, naturally spoilers do follow…
The opening crawl is back to what it should be – exciting
Look at this and consider how this immediately starts righting the wrongs of George Lucas’ prequels. A short snappy sentence up front ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger. Then we’re in to sinister territory, and playing on the audience’s curiosity about what’s happened since Return of the Jedi.
Contrast this with the snooze-inducing tax gibberish of the The Phantom Menace:
While having picked up some of the sinister vibes of episodes V and VI, The Force Awakens definitely hearkens back to the simple concepts of A New Hope:
And, fortunately, no influence from Smashmouth is apparent:
McQuarrie’s influence lives!
The late Ralph McQuarrie was the conceptual designer and illustrator who shaped the look of the original Star Wars films, conjuring up stunning visuals to give George Lucas’ concepts a physical expression.
During his career, the talented chap also added Star Trek, Indiana Jones, and even Clive Barker’s Nightbreed credits to his resume.
The Force Awakens could just about be on there, too. Even though he passed away in 2012, the current Star Wars team continue to make use of his original unused concept art – like the sketches above, concepts for Luke “Starkiller” (or a female variant thereof) but bearing more than a passing similarity to Rey’s look in in the film:
You can see some other cool examples of Ralph McQuarrie’s influence over here.
What’s in a name, Captain Phasma?
Gwendoline Christie’s chromedome costume had a touch of Cylon about it, perhaps (another Ralph McQuarrie credit, funnily), but quickly reminded JJ Abrams of something else:
“It reminded me of the ball in Phantasm” he explained “and I just thought, Phasma sounds really cool.”
Here’s the ball at work in Don Coscarelli’s 1979 horror classic (secretly restored in 4K by Abrams, as AICN reported last year):
The special effects team got up to old tricks
These guys were among the familiar fixtures in the Millenium Falcon, and as in A New Hope, they were brought to holographic life by Phil Tippett. His stop-motion work is scattered throughout the original trilogy, and while it’s largely been supplanted by CGI now, his brief here was to recreate the scene below using essentially the same tools.
Here’s how Tippett and company went about re-shooting the game of Dejarik (holo-chess to most mortals):
Kylo Ren is an angry man.
Man, did Adam Driver bring a temper to semi-trained, impetuous villain Kylo Ren. At turns terrifying and comical, his propensity for flinging his lightsaber about seems manifestly excessive, but presumably competent and cost effective computer techs are on hand to fix the damage wrought seconds after this shot:
Will he hit these heights again though? There’s talk later in the film of him completing his training, which may iron out some of the hotheadedness, even if it ups the evil.
And some competition in the petulant department may be on the way too – we were stoked to see Ben Mendelsohn cast in standalone film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and while his appearance is just teased in the trailer, one can’t help thinking the poise below may just break into something undignified at some point…
Kylo Ren is an angry man – and pretty evil, too.
Every helmeted fellow needs a place to stash his headgear.
Kylo Ren doesn’t just plop his mask in an ashtray, though. It’s much more villainous than that…
“The backstory is, that that table has the ashes of the enemies he’s killed,” Abrams told Entertainment Weekly. “That moment was actually shot for, and meant to be used in, the scene where he was talking to the Vader mask.”
“He originally had his mask off the first time we shot that scene. Then we reshot it with his mask on, but we had that shot which I loved and thought was so cool of the mask being slammed down into that ash,” Abrams says. “So that shot was stolen from the scene that we had changed and put into the scene with Rey.”
He doesn’t just take his anger out on harmless computers and iconic characters then…
The secret message on Poe Dameron’s vest
We probably all know at least one Star Wars mega-obsessive. The sort of person who could translate characters of the galaxy far, far away’s fictional, if functional, language Aurebesh. They might even have, oh I don’t know, a tattoo of it, perhaps spelling their name, or something.
Thank goodness for those sorts of folks, though, folks like @youneedapilot who tried to figure out what the characters on Poe’s flight vest say. The ones you can see on the right of his vest above.
In his tumblr post, @youneedapilot explained it all – and showed his working, including the surprising aspect that the writing was upside down. What secret message was The Force Awakens hiding? Something to unlock one of the film’s various secrets?
Turns out, it’s actually about building a functional filmic universe. One where a pilot might find himself in trouble, eject out of his X-Wing into the ocean, and look down at his predicament to find the instruction “pull to inflate”.
Stay on the lookout for any further Easter eggs like this – a “No Smoking” sign on a spaceport perhaps, “Produced in a facility that handles peanut butter” on a ration wrapper, maybe.
What the hell is Starkiller Base, exactly?
“That’s no moon,” for damn sure. But is it man-made or a planet?
On the one hand the ginormous Death Star-but-bigger bears all the hallmarks of construction in its trench, on the other it has its own weather, snowy forest, and is big enough to stage sci-fi Riefenstahl rallies like this one:
Luckily Alan Dean Foster, back to write the novelisation of The Force Awakens after much prior work including ghost-writing the original Star Wars novel, explains in prose:
“Spectacular and isolated, with a mean surface temperature varying from merely cold to permanently arctic, the planet had been altered: its mountains tunneled into, its glaciers hacked, and its valleys modified until it no longer resembled its original naturally eroded form. Those who had remade it had renamed it.
Starkiller Base.”
Yeah, still doesn’t explain why they went down the Death Star route again, though… Again…
Hey, it’s that guy! And that gal! And that… GNK!
Plenty of familiar faces turn up in The Force Awakens. Heroic co-pilots, admirals, and so on, and so on…
One of our faves, though, is the GNK power droid, a class of robot we’ve seen shuffling around Tattooine previously, and went on to become a fan fave – even coming in at number 10 in our poll of The Top 20 Non-Humans of Star Wars.
There was this one time in another film when a poor GNK was getting some rough torture treatment though:
If boring human cameos are your thing, Vanity Fair have a pretty good list. Boring, though, those humans…
What happens after this?
Just checking – you have seen The Force Awakens, right?
OK then, let’s talk about the ending. Rey tracks Luke Skywalker down. They have a dramatic meeting, as the camera swirls around them… And then – this happens*.
* This did actually happen, but on Earth and its “internet”.
‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ is out on Blu-ray and DVD now
