A cursory glance at the new TV spot for Star Wars: The Force Awakens suggests that it doesn’t reveal much. Sure, there’s a new shot or two of Daisy Ridley’s Rey getting her Donatello on with that staff—and most sites have focused on that new footage—but most of this is stuff we’ve seen before.
But a closer look reveals that the real substance of the new spot may be in the editing. Pay attention to how the footage and the voice-over and the on-screen titles are linked together:
As the voice-over (from Lupita Nyong’o’s CGI character Maz Kanata) says “I have lived long enough to see the same eyes …,” we get a shot of Rey looking in the direction of the camera. Then she continues, “… in different people,” and we get a shot of Han Solo’s eyes looking towards the camera. This would already seem to suggest that, as fans have long suspected, Rey is descended from Han Solo. (This would also presumably make Solo’s main boo, Leia, Rey’s mother, and in turn Anakin Skywalker would be her grandfather.)
But the spot doesn’t stop there. We get more voice-over from Kanata saying “I know your eyes!” over a close-up of Rey. And then the on-screen titles: “Every generation,” the first title reads (emphasis mine) before cutting to another shot of Rey, “has a story.”
GIF by the author
Of course, it’s possible that this is all just a red herring, that the TV spot is being deliberately misleading. But I doubt it. While writer-director J.J. Abrams has outright lied in interviews before to conceal the identify of his characters, the clues he lets dribble out in the marketing materials for his movies are usually pretty trustworthy. (Otherwise, people would stop paying attention to those clues in the first place.)
The other possibility is that the connection is less literal (maybe Rey is a spiritual descendant of Solo?), but given all the other visual rhymes between the way Rey has been presented thus far and the way that Luke and Anakin were presented at the beginning of previous two trilogies—all three appear as nobodies holed out on sandy planets and dressed like Tatooine moisture farmers—I wouldn’t bet on it.
All images © Lucasfilm. Illustration by the author.
