starkiller base – Club Jade

November 26, 2015November 29, 2015

Today in The Force Awakens: Meet the planets

Empire today revealed the names of three planets from The Force Awakens. Takodana looks to be the jungle world where Maz Kanata’s castle is. D’Qar may be the home of the Resistance Base. The third, Hosnian Prime, is a mystery, though a Hosnian system was mentioned in Lost Stars.

As for a fourth location, copies of Empire are out in the wild, and there is a map which contains a Starkiller Base Origin Point. (It moves! Shit.) There’s some speculation floating around about the Base’s origin perhaps being Ilum. But why is Rakata Prime, a planet that apparently originates in Knights of the Old Republic, on the map? Could it be TFA’s Dantooine, a planet that gets mentioned but never seen, or will it meet a more sinister fate?

(For what it’s worth, Pablo says the map was created for The Force Awakens Visual Dictionary, one of the December 18th releases.)

→ Mike Cooper at Eleven-ThirtyEight figures out just how much of The Force Awakens we’ve seen. Today’s spot brings it up to 5:43 minutes, so please calm down about being ‘spoiled’ by officially released footage.

→ Entertainment Weekly’s Anthony Breznican talks about BB-8 in the first of four videos. (Nothing here really struck me as anything we don’t already know, but if you’re not glued to the internet, there may be something here for you.)

→ John Boyega hasn’t seen The Force Awakens yet, while Gwendoline Christie would like to go dancing as Captain Phasma.

→ Google will now translate Aurebesh, because why not.

November 21, 2015November 21, 2015

Today in The Force Awakens: Starkiller blueprints, Times Square banners

Now Wired has blueprints of Starkiller Base. Or the set, anyway.

→ New Leia and Han banners have been spotted rotating on a digital billboard in Times Square. The Rey, Kylo Ren and Finn ones have been spotted before, but you can’t beat John Boyega’s reaction. UPDATE: Here’s Daisy Ridley’s.

→ Much ado has been made about the recent George Lucas interview on CBS, but I think Full of Sith has the best take on it, so I’ll leave it to them.

→ Waiting on better copies, but if you don’t mind fuzzy ones, there’s a new Disney Channel TV spot that contains our first (brief) look at Maz Kanata actually in the film, and another commercial that features two new X-wing pilots – one we think is Jessika Pava (as seen in The Weapon of a Jedi) and a Sullustan.

→ There’s a cute new TV spot with Threepio, Artoo and BB-8 from British telecommunications provider O2. Like the Verizon ad we’re seeing over here, it doesn’t contain any actual movie footage. (Is that Sean Bean narrating?)

→ A leaked Look and Find book has some spoilers for The Force Awakens. Read it if you dare. (Via Making Star Wars, who notes that it confirms some thing they’ve already leaked.)

November 13, 2015

Abrams, Gleeson on Starkiller Base and General Hux

In today’s first Entertainment Weekly feature, J.J. Abrams and Domhnall Gleeson discussing the First Order’s Starkiller Base and General Hux – and EW’s first spoiler warning.

Above that, however, Abrams describes Starkiller:

“It is very much — and it’s acknowledged as such in the movie — apparently another Death Star,” Abrams says. “But what it’s capable of, how it works, and what the threat is, is far greater than what the Death Star could have done. Starkiller Base is another step forward, technologically speaking, in terms of power.”

As for Hux, Gleeson reiterates that the character is ruthless

“You don’t get that high up in your life that quickly unless you’re pretty ruthless,” says Gleeson, who’s 32. “You have to put a few people down on the way to get there.” The actor also says Hux doesn’t carry a signature weapon: he has other people to do such dirty work.

What’s the appeal of the First Order to Hux? “It’s in the title: order,” Gleeson says. “It’s a desire to lump everything in its place and just have power. The desire for power is hugely motivating for a lot of people and normally the people who want all the power are not the ones who should have it.”

On his relationship with Kylo Ren, EW goes for “frenemies:”

“He’s kind of opposite Kylo Ren,” Gleeson says. “They have their own relationship, which is individual and unusual. One of them is strong in different ways than the other. They’re both vying for power.”

The ‘spoilery’ stuff is mainly speculation, but it’s not hard to connect the dots.