The finest fan theories and plot speculation from the 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' trailer

Oct. 20, 2015 7:22 AM PT

The third, possibly final trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” debuted last night. And already the Internet is awash with speculation and fan theories. So we rounded up all the clues and pieces we could link together from stills, interviews, tweets and fan theories. Warning: spoilery speculation talk ahead.

While the most recent trailer appeared to have more plot than the two previous video releases, we have to admit we’re all still trapped in director J.J. Abrams’ mystery box. It’s near impossible to gauge what’s going on with this new “Star Wars” gang. But that’s certainly not going to stop us, and the Internet, from trying.

Here’s a beat-for-beat breakdown of the revealing moments we picked up on from the trailer:

First to appear on screen is this masked face:

Thanks to previous costume reveals at the 2015 “Star Wars” Celebration and at this year’s D23 convention (both in Anaheim) we know that the face behind this mask is main character Rey, played by Daisy Ridley.

Finn, left, BB-8 and Rey, characters from the upcoming "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," are on display at the expo.

And there’s a longtime fan theory behind those goggles. Many folks suspect that Rey’s mask was actually repurposed from an old stormtrooper helmet. Hero Complex recently asked Ridley at D23 what these goggles said about her character, and she answered:

Reporter Meredith Woerner interviews Daisy Ridley on her roll in Star Wars: The Force Awakens at D23 in Anaheim Saturday August 15, 2015.

“Because Rey is a scavenger, that’s where the goggles came from,” Ridley said. “You know she repurposes things herself. She does things for herself, she is self sufficient. It’s great. I don’t know if I’m that self-sufficient. But to play someone who is, is great.”

Perhaps scavenging is why Rey is seen descending into the bowels of a derelict spaceship in the dark (quite possibly one of the many downed ships we saw in the first trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” on her current planet of residence, Jakku).

“Who are you?” a mysterious voiceover asks. Fans are already starting to speculate that the owner of this voice might be the mysterious, CG character played by Lupita Nyong’o. Named Maz Kanata, the space pirate may have first appeared in the brand new “The Force Awakens” poster, but that’s all just fan speculation at this point.

Rey answers the voice with, “I’m no one,” while the trailer cuts to a desert scene, reminiscent of the Tatooine sunset from the first “Star Wars” movie with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) standing under the twin suns. Remember, Luke was just a moisture farmer when he got started, but he was destined for great things. Could Rey also be special? Could she be a part of the Force?

We followed up on our hunch in the above D23 interview and asked Ridley if her character Rey was “Force sensitive.” She didn’t want to give too much away.

“Isn’t that a question?” Ridley laughed. “We will have to wait until Dec. 18 to find that out. But I would say that the Force is in all living things ... exclusive.”

Meanwhile, John Boyega, who plays a character known only as Finn, appears with his own voiceover entrance. “I was raised to do one thing,” Finn says without Boyega’s real-life British accent. “But I’ve got nothing to fight for.”

These deeper thoughts are juxtaposed with images of the newly named First Order (the retooled new look and term for what was formerly known as the Galactic Empire).

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FOR THE RECORD
11:49 a.m.: An earlier version of this article referred to the “New Order.” The fictional group is the “First Order.”
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Finn seems deeply troubled as he removes a dirty (possibly blood-smeared) trooper helmet. A new TIE fighter screams across an empty sky careening towards a desert planet. Previously released photos show an armor-clad Finn standing next to the wreckage of a TIE fighter on the sandy landscape of planet Jakku. Perhaps this is how Finn and Rey connect?

No word on how and where Finn stashed his trooper suit and how he found new cool-guy desert duds (which fans have already pointed out were originally seen on character Poe Dameron).

Moving on to the bad guy, enter Kylo Ren via a very Abrams-like lens flare shot.

Played by Adam Driver, Ren has been heard speaking before, but always with a distorted robot voice.

“Nothing will stand in our way,” Ren says. “I will finish what you started.” This is all said while the camera hovers on the mutiliated remnants of Darth Vader’s mask. Abrams confirmed to “Entertainment Weekly” that Ren is infatuated with Vader. Even Ren’s own voice-changing helmet is an homage to the former big bad, “The movie explains the origins of the mask and where it’s from,” Abrams said, “but the design was meant to be a nod to the Vader mask.”

And this is also the first time we see what Ren is potentially capable of as a bad guy, because it looks like he has the next edition of the “Star Wars” new class possessed by his powers of the Dark Side. Actor Oscar Isaac, who is playing Poe Dameron, is seen screaming at Ren’s hands. The second “Force Awakens” trailer showed Poe in captivity under the blaster of a stormtrooper -- perhaps this is what happened?

Very little is known about Poe’s character, but we do know is that he’s a pilot for the resistance. And that Poe grew up with the stories of the Rebellion. At D23 we asked Isaac what it was about Dameron that appealed to him as an actor:

“I liked that it was someone that had grown up with the same stories that we’ve all grown up with [from] the original films,” Isaacs said. “And so playing somebody that’s wanting to live up to those heroes from the past. I thought that was a really fun thing to play.”

In the trailer, Rey asks Harrison Ford, who plays long-time Jedi cynic Han Solo, about, “Those stories about what happened --”

Han responds, “It’s true, all of it.” Looks like somebody finally found faith in the Force.

Also this implies that Poe Dameron wasn’t the only character to grow up on the stories of the Rebellion. But if Rey doesn’t know that these stories are actually fact, we can only wonder how outlandish the stories of Luke, Leia and Han might seem to someone 30 years later (when “The Force Awakens” is set). Especially when Han has to actually say in this trailer, “The Jedi, they’re real.” People still don’t know the Jedi are real?

The rest of the trailer cuts from one firefight between the Resistance and the First Order to another on a woodsy location.

Also seen briefly on a similar landscape was Solo taking Finn and Rey into what fans are speculating is the Great Temple on the Moon of Yavin IV -- t he very same rebel base that launched the first assault on the Death Star in “A New Hope.”

Sure, the only thing the fans have to go on is the architecture, but if Abrams is attempting to bridge the worlds of “Star Wars” past and present, what better way than by returning to where it all started for the Rebel scum?

Meanwhile, possibly on that same forest-covered planet, Poe Dameron and Finn share a truly odd glance with one another.

This may merely be before-battle nerves -- however, now that we’ve seen Kylo Ren wave his hand around Dameron’s face, could something be wrong with the roguishly handsome pilot?

No one is saying, and by the end of the trailer it’s all just heaps and heaps of action sandwiched around a truly sweet moment of Han and Princess Leia hugging it out -- hugging what out? We don’t know. But it’s a tender moment tinged with actress Carrie Fisher’s tears.

The shot Disney released of BB-8 could easily have been lumped into the woods firefight, but if you look closely you can see that this droid is fighting a snowy battle. Perhaps this is on the Starkiller Base which Star Wars.com’s database describes as “an ice planet converted into a stronghold of the First Order and armed with a fiercely destructive new weapon capable of destroying entire star systems.” That quite possibly could be the hulking Death Star-looking orb seen in the recently released poster.

But after all the bombastic explosions and burning planets, the trailer ends on the Force. A helmet-free Kylo Ren flicks on his crossguard lightsaber against Finn, wielding a lightsaber of his own (well actually, we now know that’s not Finn’s lightsaber but the lost weapon of Luke Skywalker, who is questionably absent from this footage reveal. But Hamill’s voiceover was present in the first “Force Awakens” trailer, so cool your jets).

Easily the best part of this interaction between Finn and Ren is that Finn doesn’t really seem to be prepared for this at all: his mouth just drops open before the clip cuts away. Interesting.

The whole thing ends with another mysterious voice request, “The Force, it’s calling to you. Just let it in.”

End scene.

For a video that is created to churn up interest in a film, “The Force Awakens” trailer is astoundingly devoid of plot details. But let’s be real, does “Star Wars” even really need to market to fans at this point? And isn’t some of the fun going through with the rest of the rabid masses and tryingt to pick up on what Abrams is setting up? The notoriously secretive director wants to keep his Force secrets exactly that, a secret. So be certain that each second of this trailer was scrutinized for spoilers, and possibly even intentionally threaded with a few bread crumbs for the die hards.

But no real details will be revealed until opening day, Dec. 18. Here’s hoping you already got tickets.