Clever Side-By-Side Visual Comparison of The Force Awakens and A New Hope Totally Nails It

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“A New Awakening” – Star Wars Episode IV and VII Shot Comparison from Zachary Antell on Vimeo.

As you no doubt have already figured out, The Force Awakens closely parallels A New Hope. But just how much does it parallel the original trilogy? Creator Zachary Antell wanted to find out, so he made this sweet supercut showing off some of the most striking parallels between the two movies.

It starts by showing off the customary “huge ship in space” shot that opens just about every Star Wars movie ever. Kind of an easy gimme, that one, isn’t it? From there it goes on to show the villagers preparing for the invasion by the First Order, which parallels the Rebel troopers preparing for the stormtrooper boarding on that Corellian Corvette.

General shots like these seem pretty obvious, but Antell’s clever eye really shows in the somewhat meta references. For example: Lor San Tekka’s death at the hands of the Darth Vader proxy, Kylo Ren, is reminiscent of the scene in which Vader interrogates the Rebel trooper aboard the Corvette. Poe being captured and brought to Kylo looks eerily similar to the scene in which Vader threatens Princess Leia.

Poe being saved by a stormtrooper–that’s Luke saving Leia. Sidebar: a lot of these parallels set Poe up to be Princess Leia’s proxy, and you know what? That’s totally fine. The shots framed from above to show Finn in the Millennium Falcon’s gun turret? Again, a total mirror of Luke and Han doing the same thing.

A few of them are fairly generic, though. You can really only make “jump to lightspeed” look original and unique so many times until it all starts to just blend together.

You really should take a look at the video for yourself. There’s plenty of little things that really deserve to be seen, lots of little visual cues that are very subtle nods that definitely made me grin more than a few times.

(via Gizmodo)

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Jessica Lachenal
Jessica Lachenal is a writer who doesn’t talk about herself a lot, so she isn’t quite sure how biographical info panels should work. But here we go anyway. She's the Weekend Editor for The Mary Sue, a Contributing Writer for The Bold Italic (thebolditalic.com), and a Staff Writer for Spinning Platters (spinningplatters.com). She's also been featured in Model View Culture and Frontiers LA magazine, and on Autostraddle. She hopes this has been as awkward for you as it has been for her.