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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the seam: the frame where the film stops showing you something and starts reminding you of it.