88 seconds, lol. if you start with john boyega's appearence and remove all the fades, this is more like 40 seconds.
so my thoughts?? Well...Do people still say 'Meh' ? lol, the once proud saga formerly known as Star Wars continuing the tradition- started in 2002 - of failing to meet even the lowest expectations (speaking for myself, of course.)
I guess I can mention the stuff I liked:
-That cute little soccer ball droid looks like fun. So this is what happens when young whipper-snapper millennials that grew up on Metroid Prime design robots for Star Wars ;P
-The x-wings skimming over the water looked pretty cool. Has a graceful, clean elegance as opposed to flashy, garish, excessivley opulent over-production that hurt so much of the PT.
-A forest planet with snow. Endor and Hoth made a baby!!! BWAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA. Oh well, A life-long midwesterner, I am always good for snow. I am assuming its not endor in the winter-time nor a patch of forest on hoth.
Things that I strongly disliked:
-sorry, but the MF scene looked like shit. You know, I'm hearing Star Wars fans loving this trailer but I'm thinking from now on, they should release trailers unannounced thru 3rd party, so fans cannot tell if its fan-made or the real thing. That should remove any placebo effect. Cuz I can prmise you if this was in a fan trailer, everyone would say its cgi crap. It was great first seeing it when the music kicked in, but then it did this stupid circus act and looked CGI weightless and shiny and crap. That fake GIF of the MF from last week I actually liked better.
-Tatooine Again?!?!? In the 40 years since Star Wars, we have hubble identifying new and fascinating types of stars and planets, probes sending us shots of Jupiter Moons...and does it translate into any new inspiration for new worlds to create? evidently not.
Yes, I know. Tatooine is the 'heart and soul' of star wars. but i dont know how they are gonna explain stuff happening on tatooine again w/o it being contrived and ham-fisted.
Things that were uninspiring and maybe a little dubious:
-Absolutely no OT cast. ok, so we see that john boyega, oscar isaac and daisy ridley are in this movie. But we have known that all year. We know nothing about their characters. so this seems pretty pointless and the brief shots we see don't offer anything. Yes I know, this is about the ST and a 'new generation' and 'it would be wrong to show OT stuff because it would be nostaglia pandering'. or something like that :P
I actually find that to be argumentative. If they had a couple shots of Han, Luke and Leia, fans stil would have loved the trailer and would say stuff like 'this is great. we see these guys we love so much older!! this is gonna generate a lot of interest cuz people are gonna be wondering what they have been up to all these years!!!'. Besides...they still could have shown r2d2 and/or 3PO. Are they gonna be also shifted into the background while the soccer ball droid takes center stage?
-The lightsaber with the crossgaurd. Others have also disliked it, but I think the main problem is how it was ignited..it came off as anti-clmatic and unintentionally funny. I can picture little kids are gonna be like: 'see that big blade is the daddy blade and the 2 things on the side are the little baby blades!' bwaaaaaahahahahahahahaa. Hopefully we will have already seen the lightsaber earlier in the movie, fully ignited - kind of like how we saw vaders light saber in SW.
But it made me think of something that i feel could be a great idea but i am afraid there wont be anything like it in the movie. A lot of talk has centered around how the PT made lightsabers seem boring because of oversaturation. I kind of understand that - afterall, what sparked a lot of imaginations with the lightsaber wasnt just how it was put together and what it did..but just the idea of a weapon having a history and referencing something from a long time ago. I actually now believe that this GFFA needs to introduce a new weapon, to recapture that feeling. This main bad guy is supposed to be some kind of grave robber and/or obsessed with Sith stuff right? how cool would it be if he discovered a super ancient sith weapon that pre-dates even yoda? not even a weapon, it could be a talisman or something? I think that could make for a cool scene - it would be like a bizzarro version of obi-wan showing luke the lightsaber!! :D
-the voiceover. so much talk about who is saying these lines. but my problem is, its not sparking anything for me. Oh well....one things for sure, whoever leaked that the line 'Wake Up' would be in the trailer obviously got a decoy trailer and will be easily marked as a leaker and fired :/
Conclusion:
I'm not sure what the producers wanted to accomplish with this. Start dialog that a new SW movie is coming? Well, ANY footage would have gotten the proverbial water-cooler conversations started (do offices still have water-coolers?).
If this was supposed to be a sign that 'the star wars you knew and love is back!!' im not sure it really acomplished that.
Maybe they took a look at the cut and want to identify potential pain points and run a test to see what kind of feedback would result?
Or maybe it was just a device to identify and mark all the word-of-mouth/social media pipelines (such as this site) and how talk is circulated and what type of feedback can be segmented into various groups.
[sigh] I dunno... just give us the damn OOT on blu ray...