In the early hours of Monday morning local time, a user calling himself Spoiler Man, who claimed to be an employee of Lucasfilm, took to the 4Chan message boards to carry out an ad hoc Q&A about the missing plot details in the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer.
Now, we know 4Chan isn’t the most illustrious of sites. It can hardly be held up as a bastion of quality investigative journalism, and is often the hunting ground of hackers and dysfunctional teenage boys, and much of its content is impenetrable before diverting to a ‘404 content not available’ page within half an hour of being posted. Luckily, the good users of Reddit were on hand on this occasion to compile some of the juiciest titbits.
WARNING: THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS. The guy's name is Spoiler Man, after all. This may, of course, be utter nonsense, but the team at Jedi News seem to think his level of knowledge is sufficient to corroborate at least some of what he has to say, and they've been right about plenty of things so far. If you don't mind reading spoilers, carry on for some of our favourite bits of info, and bear in mind once again that spoilers are ahead.
* The film is dark. Darker than the series' previous darkest moment, The Empire Strikes Back. Some 30-40 years have passed since Return of the Jedi, and the Empire and New Republic (formerly Rebels) have been locked in a war of attrition. Everyone is languishing and sick of the war, with the theatre compared to Europe in 1944. The script, which is described as "too good for JJ Abrams", begins in space, above a desert planet, which, although still unconfirmed officially, it looks pretty safe to assume to be Tattooine (aka Abu Dhabi).
* John Boyega plays a force-sensitive storm trooper who defects from The Empire and winds up stranded on Tatooine and hunted as a deserter.
* Daisy Ridley is Kira, the daughter of Han Solo and Princess Leia, but she keeps her identity secret to avoid attracting trouble. She lives in a damaged AT-AT with her mentor, Max von Sydow’s character. The pair are a kind of post-modern real life (in the movie) couple of Star Wars fan bois, who dedicate their lives to collecting Jedi and Sith artefacts. In Kira’s case, she hopes they will lead her to her uncle, Luke Skywalker, who she resents for having gone into self-imposed exile before training her (herself force-sensitive) as a Jedi. Von Sydow, meanwhile, has a dark secret of his own. He has some Sith connection, and apparently a huge reveal will show him to be a character we already know from previous movies.
* Luke Skywalker has hidden himself away, training only a handful of students since his exile. He fears for his future: As he comes closer to Yoda levels of power, he becomes more and more secluded. There are no Jedi in the open, but rumours persist that Luke has trained a few since the end of Part VI. Luke first appears in a nod to Obi Wan Kenobi dropping his hood in A New Hope. Boyega and Ridley become Luke's new apprentices, while Lupita Nyongo'o is his current one. Luke claims he exiled himself because of the ongoing war. With the galaxy in chaos, he had to ensure his safety so that a new generation could be trained. The fact that he continues to hide away despite his great power hints at an ulterior motive, however.
* The much-loved C3P0 and R2D2 are the film’s only comic relief characters, which will be a relief of the non-comic sort to fans worried about any Jar Jar Binks-style shenanigans in the new movie.
* Adam Driver is the key baddie. He is described as a force-sensitive pilot who turns to the Dark Side. Presumably due to the lack of available Jedi and Sith following the events of the previous films, he has built his own light sabre – the one we see in the trailer. Spoiler Man says it’s a ‘junk’ light sabre, made of whatever he could get his hands on, which is why it looks so different from previous incarnations.
* This time around, it’s the rebels that are building some Death Star-esque super weapon on an icy and isolated planet. This is the snowy forest where we see Driver’s character in the trailer. He’s gone there to find Andy Serkis’ character. Oh – and Driver’s character wears a mask as his face is part-cyborg. Sound familiar?
* Serkis himself meanwhile (who is currently rumoured to have two roles in the film), plays some kind of ancient, alien Sith who is exempt from the Rule of Two (that there can only ever be two Sith – a master and his apprentice, vis-a-vis Palpatine and Vader, Palpatine and Dooku, et al). One can reasonably assume Driver is seeking him out for training. And a new light sabre, maybe.
That's just scratching the surface, and don't blame us if it proves to be the fantasies of someone with far too much time on their hands. If you want to read more, head over to Reddit, and may the force be with you.
cnewbould@thenational.ae
