Unlike everyone else on the planet right now, I haven't seen the new Star Wars film. I'm not especially opposed to it, and I'm not trying to be all "I hate this popular thing! Counter-culture!" It's just not something that really grabs me. I've also never seen the second two prequels, and haven't watched the original trilogy for...many, many years.
However, it is inescapable, unless I want to stay off the internet and avoid all human interaction for the foreseeable future, which...I really don't want to do. So I feel like I have a pretty solid grip on the film despite not having seen it. I figured, to break up the landslide of promo blogs I seem to have going on right now, I'd share my acquired knowledge with the rest of you. That way, if you also don't want to see The Force Awakens, you can still chat about it with your friends and seem hip.
So!
This is Finn:
He seems to spend a lot of the film being surprised, I guess? I would have thought his experiences defending inner city London from alien invasions in Attack the Block (which I have seen, yay!) would leave him better equipped for sci-fi. Haha, I'm confusing the actor's character in this film with a totally different character he played in another film! Hilarious.
He appears to be a Storm Trooper, at least at first, but then he meets Poe:
Poe is a pilot, or at least someone who poses as one for recruitment posters for the Rebellion (which I remember being a big deal in the original trilogy, and I assume is still a thing, because if I remember correctly, at the end of the third film, the Empire was blown up and I'd imagine that left a hell of a power vacuum that was probably filled with endless in-fighting amongst the remaining bad guys, or at the very least, an ineffectual interim government).
Poe and Finn fall in love, I assume?
Or maybe they don't. The above picture could be interpreted in many ways, but they definitely look like they become close.
Anyway, after they hook up, they meet the new Star Wars robot. I don't know what it's called. I literally googled "New Star Wars robot" to find a picture. This is it:
I don't know how it moves. Does it roll or hover? If it rolls, what does the head do while the body is rolling? Is the head attached to the body? Did it kill and consume RD-D2? So many questions!
Anyway, they meet the robot and it (based on the sand) lives near this person:
This is Rey, who based on this picture, I'm assuming has just seen something awfully meaningful but upsetting off-screen. I'm also assuming she's a Skywalker, just because nobody else seems to be so far.
Now, I'm making a leap in logic here, but it looks like the robot blows something up, forcing Finn and Rey to runaway from...is that a cattle pen behind them? IDK, whatever. There's an explosion, everyone runs away. I guess it's also possible the bad guy did it, because he has to show up at some point. This is the bad guy (I think):
He actually looks pretty badass, like someone took all the coolest elements from Darth Vader and Darth Toad From X-Men Who's Actual Name Escapes Me Right Now, and combined them in a design guaranteed to make people think this would be a badass character. I don't know anything about him apart from his name (Kylo Ren), so I'm just going to assume he's also a Skywalker, because they seem to end up as Sith Lords a lot.
Well, just the once, I guess, but at least one third of all the Skywalkers I am aware of have become Sith Lords at any rate.
Now, the characters I do remember from the first three films...by which I mean the first chronologically released films, not the first chronologically occurring films...are Han Solo, Leia, Luke, and Chewbacca, so I'll assume they show up once the three youngsters have got together and met the bad guy at least once:
This is Han and Chewie, and it looks like Finn might actually steal Han's jacket at some point.
This is Leia, who to be frank looks 100% done with Star Wars:
I guess she should have thought twice before helping to bring down a dictatorial space regime, doubtless leaving dozens of planets rudderless and in anarchy without an over-reaching government to tell them what to do, amirite?
And this is Luke:
He's fallen on hard times, from what I can tell. But, again, taking out an entire government tends to lend to civil unrest, confusion, war, and dissension, you know? I'm not saying I'm pro-Empire, or anything, but hopefully the Rebellion had a strong, swift plan in place for replacing the Emperor after Darth Vader pushed him down a space hole and died, because I've read a lot about what happens when citizens destroy their leaders and there tends to be a lot of assassinations and bloody revolutions for the potential new leaders, and a lot of starvation and cannibalism down the line for everyone else.
Anyway, these seem to be the key players in The Force Awakens. From here my knowledge is fairly sketchy, but from what I've gathered from Tumblr, the main story seems to be Poe and Finn running from explosions while Rey watches from a distance and face-palms? It seems like Kylo Ren shows up at some point and I guess they light-sabre fight for Rey's hand, even though neither Poe or Finn are romantically interested in Rey, because they have each other. But there's almost definitely a light-sabre fight, right? Maybe Kylo Ren falls in love with Rey. Maybe they're both Skywalkers (which probably doesn't preclude him being in love with her), and they have to fight to the death to purify the bloodline or something. Maybe Rey doesn't have a love arc at all and just hangs around in the desert looking troubled but competent.
I haven't worked out how Han, Leia, Luke, and Chewie play into things, but maybe Han, Leia, and Chewie stage an intervention to get Luke off the streets and into people clothes.
I guess this is the first of a new trilogy, so probably nothing is resolved in this film. Maybe we end with Finn and Poe tentatively kissing. Maybe the neighbouring star systems realise this galaxy is a fucking mess of civil war, rebellion, and planet-sized explosions and they get embarrassed they didn't step in earlier and decide to come in and sort it all out (in way that doubtless makes everything worse, because enforced democracy is not democracy at all).
In any case, I assume the film ends on a cliffhanger, probably with everything looking great for our heroes, but with the audience knowing something bad is lurking in the near future, like maybe Kylo Ren found a spare death star? I assume they had more than one, right?
I hope this has been a helpful cheat sheet for non-Star Wars watchers. I'm sure somewhere down the line, I'll get round to seeing the film, and I'll be interested to see if my guesses are anything close to the truth, or if Tumblr and Twitter have lead me totally astray.
