New Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer Explained

Can you feel it? There has been an awakening… it’s as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in joy. A new trailer for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ has been unleashed and - much to the relief of fans around the world - it’s magnificent.

Watch it for yourself below.

This new teaser reveals a lot more of ‘Episode VII’ than the first trailer, so there’s a lot to process. Here’s everything we spotted in the new trailer. Is there anything we missed?

Fallen Empire

The first shot of the trailer reveals a downed Star Destroyer but also a crashed X-Wing too which suggests both the rebels and the Empire suffered serious losses in the years following ‘Return of the Jedi’.

Family affair

Mark Hamill’s voice over hints that we’ll be meeting a new member of the Skywalker clan, presumably Daisy Ridley’s character Rey as you see a female hand being handed a lightsaber. We’re guessing this is the daughter of either Luke or Leia (could Han Solo be the father?!) - “The force is strong in my family, my father has it, I have it, my sister has it, you have that power too.”

Update: It’s now been confirmed that the voice over is actually lifted from ‘Return of the Jedi’

Vader

Here’s Vader’s destroyed helmet. Early rumours suggested the lead villain of the film is a collector of Sith and Jedi artefacts. How they retrieved this from his funeral pyre on Endor is a mystery yet to be solved.

Old pals

This must be Luke Skywalker; the robot hand is a dead giveaway. We’re not sure where this is supposed to be but R2-D2 is there to keep his old master company.

CGI character

The person handing the lightsaber over appears to be a CGI or animatronic creation with orange skin, so we assume this is Lupita Nyong’o’s character as she’s long rumoured to be playing a mo-capped role. It looks like she’s passing the weapon to Rey, but it could just as easily be Leia.

Recognise the lightsaber?

It’s the lightsaber passed on to Luke by Obi Wan in ‘A New Hope’. Luke lost it when his hand was chopped off by Vader on Bespin in ‘Empire Strikes Back’, so how did it end up here? Is this what drives the plot forward?

A squadron of X-Wings, led by Oscar Isaac’s badass pilot Poe Dameron, swoop low over a lake on a mystery temperate planet.

Here we get another brief look at Kylo Ren wielding his now infamous cross-blade lightsaber. You can see Stormtroopers behind him in what looks like an encampment.

Now we see Rey and John Boyega’s Finn running away from a TIE fighter in the distance, with the adorable BB-8 trailing behind. Rey is a scavenger, could this junkyard be her home?

Here’s our first look at Kylo Ren’s face up close. He wears a mask, but we think it’s Adam Driver underneath the costume. Again, he’s backed up by Stormtroopers and appears to be rounding people up.

This is one of our favourite shots in the trailer. A mysterious figure on the stage is addressing hundreds of Stormtroopers with a huge red banner behind him.

You can see a new type of trooper in the distance with what looks like a flamethrower, and you can also see the new, cool looking black TIE Fighters on the left too. Who is commanding the troops? We don’t know yet.

Now we get another awesome action shot showing some TIE Fighters attacking Storm Troopers on some sort of huge space ship. One of the good guys must have stolen it, could it be why John Boyega’s character is disguised as a Stormtrooper?

This fearsome looking chrome Stormtrooper is said to be the character played by Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie, codenamed by rumour sites as Captain Phasma. But where is she? The walls look like a cross between a cave and a Death Star.

New droid BB-8 stole the show at the ‘Force Awakens’ panel announcement and here he is now on the Millennium Falcon, looking rather sheepish.

Rey offering Finn a helping hand. These two are leads in the new film so expect to see a lot more of these in the coming months.

This final sequence must be linked to the chase we saw in the first trailer as we see TIE Fighters chasing the Millennium Falcon into the belly of a huge downed space ship. It looks like an upturned Super Star Destroyer.

And this is the money shot we were all waiting for. Han Solo and Chewbacca back in action for the first time in 32. “We’re home” says Han to Chewie. You certainly are, and boy have we missed you!

- Kylo Ren Revealed In New Promo Art
- New Star Wars 7 Stormtroopers Revealed
- First Star Wars 8 Details

Image credits: Disney