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The discussion has already begun! 
But you’re right. I didn’t think this through.
Time will tell. Perhaps, we’re looking at a masterpiece. Or a flop.
These were just my two cents.
Doh!
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Yeah he does look a bit short to be a storm trooper now that you mention it.
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Fixed it.
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Happy Life Day, everybody!
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Wow, the dire predictions and criticisms after seeing about 30 seconds of actual content!
Looks potentially great to me, with nothing to criticize yet. Not sure how this short a taste can be dismissed as “derivative” in any case, without knowing anything about the plot. It is part of the Star Wars canon, after all–which makes it necessarily derivative in the way any sequel has to be. There will be a familiarity to the technology used, and it would be kind of silly is storm troopers were suddenly not a part of things, or light sabers didn’t make an appearance. We also knew this would be a continuance of the original’s stories, so the falcon is a rather unsurprising and entirely welcome sight.
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And Tatooine! LOTS of Tatooine! Y’all like Tatooine, right? Just because it’s supposedly a backwater planet where nothing important ever happens doesn’t mean it can’t be the setting for almost every key event in the history of the galaxy!
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Oh pish posh! What kind of cruel god would make an entire planet defined by one topographical feature?
Why, that would be as ridiculous as a whole world made of ice, lava or forest?!
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You mean like Europa, Io, or… well, okay, no forest moons yet.
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There’s Tattooine, for a start, though to be fair, it was one of few recurring locations in the original trilogy.
But one of the things that was really striking about the original trilogy was just how much variation we saw in environments, aliens, vehicles, uniforms, and armor, in contrast to what we saw in space opera movies and television before Star Wars Episode IV. Especially once the merchandising of toys really kicked in, it was often the subject of some mockery that the Star Wars movies seemed to go for any excuse to throw in another variant costume or new vehicle.
For instance, there was “standard” stormtrooper armor we saw most often, when the stormtroopers were on ships or the Death Star, but they wore specialized variants of that armor on almost every planet where we saw them deployed, including Tattooine. The rebels had different uniforms for different environments – at least, we saw one uniform on Hoth, another for the commandos on Endor, and what looked to be yet another uniform that Luke wore on Dagobah. Starfighters were pretty much used only in space, and speeders near planet surfaces; remember, for instance, that the rebel pilots on Hoth flew snowspeeders in combat, then transferred to starfighters to join the withdrawal, instead of just flying starfighters the whole time. Through the trilogy, we saw at least four distinct classes of TIE fighter and four classes of rebel starfighters.
By contrast, in that short clip, we see a man wearing “standard” stormtrooper armor, “standard” TIE fighters, X-Wings, and a woman wearing the Endor commando uniform while flying some sort of speeder bike. The only things not immediately recognizable as an “iconic” items from the original trilogy were clearly recognizable as variations: the woman’s blocky speeder bike, and the claymore lightsaber.
I was reminded of relatively high quality fan productions, in which there’s a bias towards perfectly recreating familiar elements and against introducing newly invented content. But this isn’t a fan production – it’s the product of a movie studio with enormous resources. They’re assumed to have the right to expand on the setting, and they don’t deserve any credit for simply recreating what was done before. The trailer, as a whole, suggests to me a surprising degree of artistic conservatism and laziness of the imagination.
The only positive thing I can say about the trailer is that it started to hook me at the beginning, as I wondered who this man was, who was wearing stormtrooper armor but who was obviously not a cloned stormtrooper. But that interest was quickly lost, as I saw just a series of expensive yet clumsy shout-outs to previous movies, ending with the ridiculous claymore lightsaber.
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Let’s see: it’s an original storyline dealing with, for the most part, completely new characters (the most consistent rumor is that the first face you see in the trailer is the main character of the first movie, and possibly the trilogy).
I’m not sure what’s “derivative” here: the fact that they used familiar ships, locations, and weapons? Well, yeah, it’s a Star Wars movie. I’d certainly hope it’s derivative of what came before!
Now, as to it being “crap”, I’ve seen 88 seconds of it. They looked terrific. Sorry that they looked like crap to you!
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Yes, exactly. It’s a distinct contrast from previous Star Wars movies, in which variation was emphasized.
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Can I just say hooray for another POC in the Star Wars films!! And front and centre in the first official footage.
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Well, for comparison the vast majority of settings in The Empire Strikes Back looked absolutely nothing like anything that appeared in A New Hope, even though the story largely followed the same group of characters. Dagobah looked nothing like Tatooine, the rebels didn’t patrol Hoth in X-wing fighters, few people wore the same outfits they had in the first film, etc. The biggest constant was the Millennium Falcon.
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Seems to me that the tiny glimpse we got was meant specifically to assure fans that JJ Abrams knows what they want. We’re seeing streamlined Stormtrooper armor, a Sith lord with a funky lightsaber, X-Wings, the Falcon, and nostalgic locales. The shoots for the movie happened in all sorts of unusual locales, so I don’t think it’s fair to assume from this teaser that the movie is nothing but a big crappy retread of what you’ve seen before.
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Yah, come on: This is Star Wars.
Not Star Trek, or Dune, or The Death Gate Cycle…
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That’s credible. JJ Abrams managed to irritate a lot of Star Trek fans with his spin on the setting. (Though I think he doesn’t get enough credit for bringing some key aspects of the Star Trek premise back into the foreground.) So I can see that he’d be anxious to prove that he’s going to maintain continuity with the original trilogy.
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The shot of the snowy forest at night, with the red lightsaber sparking to life… that locale isn’t really like anything I’ve seen in a Star Wars film before. All of these clips beg very interesting questions. Whether or not those questions are going to lead to garbage or (worse) nothing, we’ll have to wait and see. After the prequel debacle I swore to never get excited about a Star Wars film again, but… I will cautiously say that aesthetically, I Iike what I saw in this teaser. It just doesn’t mean anything yet.
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I think 88 seconds is too little to tell much of anything, but… the rolling droid design, the new lightsaber, the locales… they seemed pretty varied from the old material. I’m curious to see what a future projected from the original trilogy looks like through Abrams’ lens–has the dismantling of the Empire caused stagnation in the galaxy? Is there new technology or does it have a more post-apocalyptic feel? Again… we’ve gotten almost nothing right now. I like the tone of this trailer, but years ago I was fooled by the tone of the first trailer for Phantom Menace, and that was a horror show in the end.
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