Five Things We Learned from the New Star Wars: The Force Awakens Japanese Trailer

Walt Disney Studios Japan dropped a new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer that was made with Asian audiences, specifically the Japanese market, in mind this morning, surprising fans around the world. Thanks to the always-international nature of the internet, these tailor-made local market features don’t stay local for long, after all.

While the trailer’s initial reception is decidedly more mixed than their previous efforts, with some fans taking to twitter and lamenting what seem like spoilers with some pivotal scenes and maybe a bit too much footage.

None-the-less, there is a lot of new footage in here, and some major moments that should be discussed. We’ll put a SPOILER warning tag here, because some of this may be entering that territory. Here are the five biggest new things in the trailer.

BB-8 speaks!

Yes, we got to hear BB-8’s “voice” here, and it’s predictably adorable. Rather than the beeps and whistles of R2-D2, or the grumpy wah-wah-wahs of Chopper on Star Wars Rebels, BB-8 has a very cute, higher-pitched, and inquisitive series of longer tones. Those longer tones make the droid inherently more understandable and emotional sounding. it’s why when Artoo does his longer “Wheeeeeoooooo” sound, we know he’s sad. An interesting and notable shift here for the new droid star, as he sounds almost more like a cartoon dog than previous droids.

“I know all about waiting…”

Rey’s quote in conversation with the diminutive droid certainly plays to fan theorists quite a bit.

“I know all about waiting…” she says. It then cuts to (this may or may not be the actual next line, after all – it’s a trailer!), “for my family!”

The description of the film on the Japanese site for The Force Awakens also centers on Rey and the idea of her waiting on this desert planet for her family to return. Of course, one of the most popular theories about Rey is that she’s in fact a lost Solo, daughter of Han and Leia. This could be a hint to that, or it could just be playing into those fans a bit.

A clearer timeline of Jakku events

We won’t spell it out for you here, but it sure seems like we have a pretty clear timeline of Jakku events in this trailer. A few notable parts of that:

– The First Order is looking for something: When an evil organization torches an entire town, they’re typically looking for something or someone. Finn? Anakin/Luke’s lightsaber? Don’t know, but it’s pretty clear in this trailer that’s what’s going on.

– Finn and Rey’s fast-paced adventure: Finn and Rey don’t get around to introducing themselves until, it seems, they’re already on the Millennium Falcon. So we can expect a lot of action from the moment they meet to the moment they introduce themselves, if they don’t even have time for names to be exchanged.

– BB-8 comes out of nowhere: We know from toys and trailers alike that BB-8 is, at some point, Poe Dameron’s astromech droid. Rey doesn’t know where the droid has come from. Did Poe go looking for her or for whatever the First Order is trying to find, and crash on Jakku? We might be seeing the three newbies meet earlier than we thought.

Poe Dameron: Resistance Leader?

In what’s really only Poe’s second shot not in the cockpit of an X-Wing, he’s shown on some kind of bridge or in a war room, alongside Leia and C-3PO (with his red arm, naturally). Now that we’ve seen Star Wars: Shattered Empire, the comic book that takes place after Return of the Jedi, we know that Poe’s parents were both part of the Rebel Alliance, and that Leia knew them, especially his mother, fairly well. The questions here then are: how high up in the Resistance / New Republic is Poe, and how close is he to Leia? Everyone’s so focused on figuring out her relationship to Rey that they may have missed a very “Aunt”-like relationship with Poe that’s been right under our noses.

Leia the wise Force user?

We see Kylo Ren and Rey coming face-to-firy-lightsaber, we see Rey crying over something or someone, and then we here Leia’s second line of dialogue from the film, again capping the trailer:

“Hope is not lost today. It is found.”

It’s an interesting line – not as mystical as the Force-oriented line at the end of the initially released full trailer, but still poignant. It’s especially so when taken in context with what Carrie Fisher tweeted out with her character poster, the line reassuring Luke that they have the Force, and with the line at the end of the other trailer, about letting the Force in.

As much as people initially thought Luke would be in the “Obi-Wan” role here, what if it’s Leia? She’s the one offering wisdom in three consecutive instances here, talking much like Obi-Wan, or even Qui-Gon might in the past. Leia’s relationship to the Force has also been a focus in the in-canon comics from Marvel, which have been said to have hints at the future.