Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Star Wars: The Force Awakens
2015 · J.J. Abrams · Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the wrecked Star Destroyer half-buried in the Jakku sand. (setting)
Rey scavenges parts from inside the hull of the kind of ship that once filled the top of the frame. Carter and Gilford stage the new story inside the wreckage of the old one.
Payoff: One image states the film's method: everything here gets built on the body of what came before it. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the wreck the film's symbol: one object holding its central relation, the new built on the carcass of the old.
Listen for Williams bringing back the old melodies on cue. (sound)
Williams is the only original creative principal to work on every saga film. He drops established motifs at moments of recognition and writes new material for Rey and for Kylo Ren's First Order.
Payoff: The old melodies do not build feeling. They release feeling you already stored, which is how a few notes carry a whole scene. In the reading: mark. The reading calls these marks: sounds and objects that mean by habit, so hearing one makes you supply everything attached to it.
Notice the lens flares and the handheld camera during fights. (camera)
Mindel shot on 35mm with anamorphic lenses. Flares streak across the frame and the camera rides a shoulder through the duels, then settles into composed wides for the planets.
Payoff: The look insists these places were photographed rather than rendered. That was the corrective Abrams promised after the digital prequels.
Watch the actors react to BB-8 as a real object. (performance)
BB-8 was built as a rolling puppet operated on set, and much of the creature work is animatronic. Ridley and Boyega are looking at something physically present, and their eyelines and timing show it.
Payoff: Performers answer a thing in the room differently than they answer a tennis ball on a stick. You can see the difference in their eyes.
Count how quickly the film moves between its three new leads. (cutting)
Markey and Brandon cut faster than the original trilogy ever did, cross-cutting Rey, Finn and Poe and keeping several threads live at once. Scenes rarely get a beat of quiet before the next push.
Payoff: This is contemporary blockbuster rhythm. Momentum does the work that pauses used to do in the older films.
Once you have seen it
Watch the catwalk over the abyss when Han says his son's name. (staging)
Nothing in the scene's own setup accounts for how hard it lands. Ford has carried this character for nearly forty years, and Abrams puts the moment on a narrow bridge with nothing underneath it.
Payoff: Your history with the character is the instrument. The film borrows decades of your own watching and turns it back on you. In the reading: the mental-image. The reading calls this the relation-image: the meaning is not in the shot, it is assembled from what you already carry into it.
Compare the plot to A New Hope and count the matches. (structure)
Desert orphan, hidden map inside a droid, a cantina of aliens, a mentor figure, an assault on a planet-killing weapon. Kasdan and Abrams hit the 1977 beats in roughly the same order.
Payoff: Recognition is the engine here, not the decoration. Knowing the shape in advance is exactly what the film is counting on.
Listen to Kylo Ren's saber crackle and spit. (sound)
Skywalker Sound gave the crossguard blade an unstable, sputtering voice against the clean hum every other lightsaber in the saga has. Driver plays Ren the same way, volatile rather than implacable.
Payoff: The sound tells you what kind of antagonist this is before he does anything. Vader was control. This one leaks.
Carry this in: Watch for the seam: the frame where the film stops showing you something and starts reminding you of it.