Earlier today, Disney and Lucasfilm released a set of new character posters for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. As you will see below, they are pretty bland in their design ambition. The most interesting thing might be the detail in the two Lightsabers being held by Finn (John Boyega) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Notice how gnarly Kylo’s saber is, another indicator that his relationship to The Force, like the weapon he wields, is a bit more raw and unrefined. That’s what makes him so exciting, not just as a bad guy, but as a character in general.
While these posters aren’t inspiring us to open up any wall space, they are inspiring a few questions. With a J.J. Abrams movie, everything exists within the context of the Mystery Box, so everything is worth decoding to a certain extent. This is my best attempt to decode some of what’s going on here. Of course, these questions assume that we’re not going to get a dump of more character posters in the coming weeks between now and December 18 (it’s a really stupid assumption to make, I know). If we do get a new poster, let’s hope we get some BB-8 action. I’d put that on my wall.
But first, questions:
1. Seriously, where is Luke Skywalker?
2. Which of these characters is going to lose their right eye? Or better yet, who is going to end up with a wicked scar? Is it Luke that’s missing an eye? Is that why they won’t show him?
3. How are these characters connected? Aside from all having a penchant for holding their favorite tool (I’m guessing Leia’s is some sort of map or galactic radar) over their right eye, what’s the connection? Let’s all take a moment to draw some drastic and (yes, I know it’s not canon) Expanded Universe-informed assumptions about lineage. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
4. Does this mean that one (or most) of the other new characters don’t have any greater cosmic importance and might not make it very far in the new trilogy? If so, my roommate is going to be sobbing over his Poe Dameron Black Series figure for months. I need to prepare in order to be able to give the proper moral support.
5. What’s the point of not giving Chewbacca his own poster? He’s the real star of these movies. Also, AGGGHHHHH!
Alright, so maybe I don’t have that many questions and my humor for these soulless posters is running thin. If we find ourselves in two weeks receiving posters for Captain Phasma, General Hux, Poe Dameron and BB-8, perhaps the situation will improve. If not, it will (a) stoke the fires of a lot of theories about the connectedness of these five characters and (b) prove that Disney is really phoning in the marketing on The Force Awakens.
Either way, the movie is coming out on December 18 and we’ve all already got our tickets, so it doesn’t really matter what they release. The next poster could be the Millennium Falcon’s Holochess set and we’d still… wait, that would actually be really cool. Someone get J.J. on the phone!
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