New 'Star Wars' Clip Reminds Us of the First Order's Nazi Comparisons
The split second shot in the new 'Force Awakens' TV spot looks straight out of WWII history books.
Another day, another millisecond of new Star Wars footage buried deep within a 30-second TV spot. The Disney marketing machine is relentless, but hey, we’re not burnt out on The Force Awakens just yet.
This new clip debuted Sunday during the American Music Awards where it presumably attempted to pick up some awareness among One Direction and Jennifer Lopez fans: Do Star Wars fans watch the AMAs? Does anybody watch the AMAs?
Anyway, most of the half-minute spot is comprised of footage we’ve seen over and over again. Epic X-Wing battles, Rey walking with BB-8 on the sand of Jakku, Kylo Ren looking pissed off in that mask and slinging his hilted lightsaber around; you name it.
The one new bit of footage looks like it makes a connection that’s only been hinted at throughout the entire Star Wars saga: the Empire, and now the First Order, are just a bunch of no-good space Nazis. In an interview with Time in August, director J.J. Abrams said the new villains “came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again.” It looks like he was more spot-on than we realized.
At the 23-second mark, First Order Stormtroopers are seen either fist pumping to some sick, unheard house music, or sieg heiling to what looks like Domhnall Gleeson’s character General Hux.
This split-second footage is enough to back up Gleeson and Abrams’ comments from last week about what separates Kylo Ren, a lone wolf of sorts, and Gleeson’s Hux, who appears to revel in mass power. The shot of Hux in front of a mass of stormtroopers is reminiscent of the Third Reich’s propagandist rallies at Nuremberg.
The Nuremberg Rally in 1934.
We’ll see how their vying for power plays out against the continuation of the massively popular space epic when The Force Awakens is released in theaters on December 18.
