‘The Force Awakens’…and I Want to Go Back to Sleep

Perhaps if this trailer had come out when I was in the fifth grade – when my crush on Luke Skywalker was all-encompassing, when I proudly wore a Queen Amidala shirt to class, when my dad took me out of school to go see The Phantom Menace and, though he fell asleep during it, I watched it and pretended that I enjoyed it – then PERHAPS I would have been excited over the teaser trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens.

But years of being disappointed by Star Wars’ representation of women, the realization that my beloved Princess Leia was essentially mute by the end of the original trilogy, and the fact that J.J. Abrams got his self-important fanboy hands on a story that meant so much to me for so long, has rendered me close to indifferent about the essentially bland teaser.

The most exciting moment of the teaser was realization that there’s at least one other black person in the galaxy besides Lando. Beyond that, we get some quick glimpses of what looks like Tatooine, an adorable new roly-poly droid, some X-wings grazing over water, a bad-ass looking new lightsaber that has a seemingly useless crossguard, and of course, “the light and the dark”. We know nothing of the plot, and aside from the end shot of the Millennium Falcon, there’s nothing that harkens back to the original trilogy.

So, what’s the excitement? Is it purely nostalgia? With the recent release of the Jurassic World trailer, it seems that 20-30-40-somethings are the new target audience for Hollywood. Like this trailer, Jurassic World left me cold: the plot seems ridiculous and the dinosaurs are entirely too CGI-heavy. Are these films being made by people who genuinely love the original or simply by people who want to recreate the blockbuster money-making mania that these original films provided? J.J. Abrams is a self-proclaimed Star Wars super fan, but he also helped turned Star Trek into a sexist, white-washed Apple commercial lookalike. Also, like the new non-functional lightsaber in this trailer, the trained raptors and modified dinosaurs of Jurassic World ask way too much of its audience. Are we really supposed to accept these nonsensical additions to story lines that have been analyzed and dissected by thousands of obsessive fans?

Look, I’m not saying that Jurassic World and Star Wars VII are going to be bad movies. I had no faith in Marvel’s Thor and ended up loving it. There are plenty of faults in both the original Star Wars and Jurassic Park (Stormtroopers are terrible at their jobs and why in God’s name did they clone raptors to begin with?), and yet we love them. So will lightning strike twice for these franchises? I can’t say. All I can say is, “eh.”

What did you think of the Star Wars VII trailer? Which nostalgia trip are you most excited to take next year: Jurassic World or Star Wars VII? Tell us below in the comments!

Author: Kerry

Help support independent journalism. Subscribe to our Patreon.

Copyright © The Geekiary