BenRG

Well, here I am, flabbergasted at the sheer emotional power of the Star Wars VII - The Force Awakens theatrical trailer. Star Wars (now known as Star Wars IV - A New Hope) was the first 'adult' movie that I watched waaay back when I was just 3 years old in 1977. I can honestly say that the trailer managed to evoke the majesty and spectacle of the Original Trilogy in a way that the Prequel Trilogy never did.

Okay, so here are my thoughts on the likely back-story of the movie:

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BEWARE - Possible Spoilers!
Watch the trailer before reading this!

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My guess is that the galaxy sort of fell into anarchy after the end of the Civil War. There are several different factions but no-one has been able to get enough of an advantage to reunite the galaxy, Empire or Republic. I suspect that Kylo Ren is part of a faction that has emerged that is determined to reunite the galaxy, no matter the cost. He has latched onto Anakin's dream (as he expressed to Padmé in 'Attack of the Clones') of a galaxy of order and justice no matter what it takes and how tyrannical the means and wants to see it through - What TVTropes.org would call a 'Templar' or a 'Well-Intentioned Extremist'. As we can see, he's chosen the Dark Path to do so.

My guess is that, in the post-Imperial anarchy, our heroes have mostly ended up as exiles. In the 30 or so years since Darth Sideous and Darth Vader's deaths, the whole story of the Civil War has become entangled with the various factions' propaganda and political agendas. It has come to the point that not everyone really believes that there ever had been a 'good' uprising against the central government, nor does everyone really believe that there were once Space Wizards capable of calling on something called 'The Force'.

Over-ideological embarrassments to some sides because they won't play the politicians' games and criminals to be killed to others, our heroes have been totally marginalised. It looks like Han and Leia have been trying to keep at least an echo of the original Rebellion and its goal of restoring the Republic alive. Meanwhile, Luke has never been able to train any apprentices (or if he has, only a vanishingly small number). This is either because it has never been safe for him to act openly or, perhaps, because General Order 66 was very successful in wiping out nearly all the Force-sensitive bloodlines except for a few favoured by the Emperor himself. In either case, it seems that he now lives at least in part a hermit, possibly in that temple we see on the planet where Han and Leia are maintaining their own faction. Now, Finn and maybe Rey come forwards and, perhaps, Luke and Leia have finally a chance to pass on their legacy.

tl;dr - The Sequel Trilogy will be about the two conflicting legacies of Anakin Skywalker - A dark, destructive, nihilistic order verses one of light, freedom and healing. The irony is that Rey, Finn and Kylo all have the same objective: to end the destructive conflict and restore peace to the galaxy; they just have very different ideals about how this needs to be done.

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PART 2
Possible Movie Plot

Okay, here's my call. It's random and it's probably wrong:

• Film starts with Snoke speechifying to his troops. Phasma and Kylo then lead the troops on a raid against some helpless planet 'to impose order', which turns into a massacre. The sequence ends with Finn having a very bad reaction to events when back on his command ship;

• We cut to Rey on Jakku, doing her scavenger thing and basically showing that she doesn't want to live in this desert community descended from the survivors of a long-ago space battle;

• Finn, sickened, steals a TIE Fighter and shoots up the landing bay of a Star Destroyer and escapes only to get shot down over Jakku. After wandering for a while, he arrives in Rey's hometown. She introduces him to 'The General' (Han), who she describes as a 'crazy old man with a great line in stories'. However, Han gets warning that The First Order are on their way to attack the planet; he tries to persuade Rey and Finn to leave with him;
  

• The First Order attack Jakku, probably for no other reason than to 'impose order'. Han and Chewie have the Falcon nearby and somehow they manage to turn the raid back single-handedly, shooting down a Star Destroyer in the process; Rather than take the two youngsters back to the settlement, Han announces that he needs to take them to 'somewhere safe' and the Falcon jumps to lightspeed;

• Rey is doing her stint in the Falcon's cockpit when something (The Force) impels her to drop back to sublight in the Endor system. Han grumbles but, thanks to his long association with Luke, has learnt to trust hunches like this. Finn and Rey encounter Kylo and some of his fellow Knights of Ren. There is a brief battle in which our plucky heroes are completely outmatched; Finn is knocked out by a falling tree and Kylo orders the other Knights to kill them whilst he goes to take what he came for - Vader's helmet. There, he encounters Luke and R2. It is quickly clear that, although far older, the Jedi Grand Master is skilled and powerful enough to sweep Kylo aside like a gnat, so he pulls a typical Sith trick and tells him that he needs to decide what is more important - the Sith relic he is guarding or the two Resistance fighters that he has left with his colleagues to execute in whatever way amuses them. Luke makes his choice (the only choice) and swoops in to take out the Knights whilst Kylo takes Vader's helmet and flees, leaving his colleagues to their fate at Luke's hands;

• Han flies the two battered two youngsters to the Resistance base on Yavin-IV, where he meets up with Leia for the first time in decades. Han then takes the two youngsters to Luke's hermitage. It is revealed through exposition that Rey is Luke's daughter and that Han took her into hiding on Jakku when the attempts to unify the galaxy after the Civil War imploded and the leaders of the Rebellion became wanted outlaws by almost all the factions. Luke implies strongly that Kylo Ren is someone known to him personally but he is reluctant to be precise on how;

• At this point, the Starkiller arrives in the Yavin system. Initially, the First Order attempts to take the planet by a surface assault. However, the Resistance puts up a tremendous fight both in air and on the land (including Luke and Leia holding off a whole legion of Stormtroopers and vehicles on their own at one point). However, Leia knows that they are fighting a losing battle: no-one knows where the Starkiller's 'small thermal exhaust port' is, unfortunately. The Resistance's ships start making their escape but Poe volunteers to lead a rearguard to hold the line until the last possible moment. The sequence climaxes with the Falcon and Rey's X-Wing jumping to lightspeed just as the Starkiller blows up the Yavin system;

• First epilogue is Kylo monologuing about his goals to Poe before using the Force to strip out all the secrets about the Resistance that Poe has in his mind. As a few other Knights drag Poe's (presumed) corpse out of the room, he delivers the "I will finish what you started" line to Vader's helmet;

• Second epilogue is somewhere else where our heroes are taking stock. Luke delivers his 'The Force is strong in my family' line to the youngsters. Finn, who wants a cause, is very ready to accept Luke's offer of training. Rey is initially unwilling to believe that the 'magic' she's seen Kylo use to such evil effect could have any good in it. Leia reminds her of all the intuitive guesses and luck she's enjoyed all her life; the thing that kept her alive when she flew an X-Wing during the second Battle of Yavin on more than one occasion. The Force is calling to her; she needs to let it in. Rey finally agrees. Leia gives Anakin's lightsaber to Rey but the girl ceremonially gives it back, noting that Leia had made the best use of it to date and that she would make her own, when the time comes;

• The film ends with them watching the stars from the roof of what is now the closest thing the galaxy has to a Jedi Praexium.

I just thought that I'd add my thoughts to the current frenzy of analysis and speculation regarding the Fallout 4 Teaser Trailer. Take this as seriously or as lightly as you wish:

Protagonist
The leaked script, if accepted as accurate, confirms that the protagonist is either the father or the mother in the family we see in the trailer (I suspect that if you select a female character, then the protagonist is the mother with a suitably-modified script and a female VA). My guess is that he/she is an employee of Vault-Tec (thus the Vault-Tec poster in the kitchen/dining nook) and thus had a guaranteed place in Vault-111.

More importantly, the protagonist is a veteran of the war in Alaska and the annexation of Canada (a soldier for a male character, an army nurse for the female character, given that the 1950s-themed pre-war society would likely have still had rigid gender role bars). Something of a 'dark past/the redeemer' aspect is suggested to me by this possibility.

Vault-111
Given the leaked script suggests that the inhabitants of Vault-111 were kept in cold sleep until the subjective 'present', I'm thinking that they were part of Vault-Tec's sick social experiments. Specifically, they were the control group - kept in Cold Sleep to ensure no social changes occurred in the group so that the monitoring staff at Vault-112 could compare how an unchanged social group managed post-war compared to the various changed groups in the other vaults.

I suspect that the timer that was meant to wake the inhabitants of Vault-111 failed and they were not awoken until a second-level fail-safe trigger event - the activation of a Garden of Eden Creation Kit nearby.

Consequently, instead of being catapulted into the post-war anarchy or even the rebuilding epoch of Fallout 3 and Fallout - New Vegas, the inhabitants of Vault-111 are in a world where society is mostly-rebuilt. There are large population centres, fairly organised government (the Enclave on the East Coast and the New California Republic on the West Coast and into the interior) and probably a lot less official and local tolerance for strangers rocking the boat on the grounds that "we didn't used to do it this way".

BTW - The people on top of the vault when the blast-wave hit all survived. Look at the art of the Vault's top-cap and you'll see lots of high-voltage electrical insulator discs set around the circumference. I suspect that the top cap had an electromagnetic field designed to protect those on top of the cap from the blast waves of reasonably distant nukes long enough for them to get inside. That doesn't changer the horror that those fourteen survivors will always feel as they remember seeing the desperate people just outside the field getting incinerated and blasted apart as the wave hits.

Setting
As the game is set in Boston, near the Institute, I wonder if they're going to be the bad guys or at least the plot drivers of the story. Most of it will be about the Old Soldier learning to find his or her place and one for the survivors in the Vault in the new world that has grown up in the new Commonwealth.

However, I suspect that The Institute may know more about Vault-Tec's experiments than has been previously admitted. Even now, centuries later, those brilliant minds, freed of law, ethics and possibly even flesh and blood, might be carrying on those social experiments to create a perfect society. When the new society does not meet their predetermined standards, they may decide to destroy it. Fortunately, the Old Soldier is there to stop them.

I strongly suspect that The Enclave will be strongly entrenched in Boston (Commonwealth City?). The presence of Eye-bots suggests that they keep important locations like Diamond City under observation and the sequence when you're flying in a Vertibird with a Steel Legionnaire suggests that they also provide at least a significant semblance of police services within the civilised parts of Boston. Outside those, as the sequence with the feral Ghouls, the Super-Mutants, the Mirelurk and Deathclaw, the Massachusetts Wastelands remain a dangerous place.

That said, apart from the nuke that hit nearby New York, the area seems to have escaped the worst devastation. I wonder if the main attacks on the area were chemical rather than nuclear, promoting mutations rather than outright destruction of the sort we saw in earlier games.

Gameplay
This story will be very strongly plot-driven with certain tasks you need to complete in order to progress further. We've seen that there is going to be a home-base (the garage set, which I suspect is in the protagonist's home district). I suspect that you'll be able to craft, repair and upgrade. Amongst the things you can do is craft and customise weapons, armour and other survival equipment, improve your PipBoy and fix the family's Mr Handy service robot. The long-term-project is to get a set of T45 power armour, a minigun and a rocket launcher and heavy lasers operational so that you can storm your way into the Big Bad's base.

Collectables are back in the form of training and recreational magazines that may also give skill bonuses as well as the Bobble-heads with a similar function. There are also the collectable cards on the Vault-Tec noticeboard with the perk symbols on them, making me wonder if you can optimise skill and perks that your character has over time. Possibly, skill levels can be greatly modified by removing old cards from the collection board and adding new ones (although doing so may erase the old bonus until you earn the perk again).

I suspect that the opening scenes of the Trailer is a slightly-redressed version of an in-game scene where the protagonists visits his old home and has a flashback to The Last Day. However, it is also possible that, as with The Last of Us, there is going to be a prologue/tutorial first act of the game set at The Beginning of the End of the World.

Diamond City is going to be a shopping district, IMO. You can buy weapons, food, survival equipment and medicines there.

The rest of Boston is going to be strongly story-led. There will be places you can go to regularly like the bar ('Memory Pit', IIRC) and the bank built under USS Constitution. The latter, I suspect, will change almost any unit of exchange, especially precious metals and other rare materials, for bottlecaps. However, some you will be only able to access in the story mode when they are part of the story. These may include the Enclave's local HQ in one of the new skyscrapers we see rising over the old city.

Beyond that, I suspect it is going to be pretty much a standard post-apocalyptic exploration/survival game with a very, very significant story aspect. There will be a multiplicity of weapons, including melee weapons, craftable or available from Swatters at Diamond City. There may also be a significant stealth element and puzzle solving and 'find your path' elements that opens up different concluding options towards the end of the story. This latter option interests me as it means you may have to play the game many times and make multiple different decisions to open up different and even optimal endings.

I also wonder if there will be a 'sandbox' game that unlocks when you complete the story mode?

I'm a fairly easy-going sort but some people get under my skin. There's no need to be rude or insulting, no matter how much you disagree with someone. Unfortunately, that's just the sort of behaviour that gets me reciprocating in kind. This is maddening in a way because it makes me do the sort of things that I disrespect in others - insults, flaming and dismissive sarcasm.

It's a hard thing to walk away when someone insults you. It's hard when someone responds to a reasoned explanation with dismissing rage. However, sometimes, you have to grow up and be the bigger person. You have to choose to be the peace-maker and stop an argument. Sometimes you just have to respect that someone doesn't share your viewpoint and considers your viewpoint invalid to the point of it causing them rage.

I don't want to be the cause of fights. For this reason, I've hidden a few of my comments because of the reaction of the artist and what I presume is a friend/party follower. I did this out of respect for the artist's space but, more importantly, because I realised that they weren't willing to listen to my explanation for the comment or my reasons for making it. I'm sure that they will perceive this as a 'victory' but the more I think about it, the less I care about that.

The point is that I refused to throw the next punch. I refused to utter the next insult. I refused to continue a fight that never really had must point in the first place.

I'm just trying to be a better person.

To me, the moral of the film was very simple: Don't forget to have fun.

The dad (Will Ferrell) was so focussed on building his perfect LEGO universe that he forgot to enjoy it. Everything became about building a perfect world and then freezing it in that perfection forever. Young Finn reminded him that the purpose of hobbies and play is to have fun, of which expressing wild feats of imagination is a major aspect. One he knew that, he was happy, maybe even a little spiritually renewed to be part of his son's playful adventure world.

This is a lesson a lot of us adults on the Internet can learn. I see it in almost every fandom with which I'm associated: an obsession with continuity, internal consistency and the like. Somewhere along the line (and I'm guilty of this sometimes) we get so focussed on things being right that we forget that they also need to be good. What's the use of watching a show just to look for continuity errors and then bitch about it in your blog? What's the point of buying a construction toy and then sticking it on a shelf, never to be disturbed again? What's the point of writing a fan-fiction or making a fan-art if you're so obsessed with being 'canon-compliant' that it might as well be a transcript or bit of production art for the show/movie?

It's this po-faced perfectionism and nit-picking that murders fandom after fandom and turns them into a drag to be associated with. It's really this that pushed me out to the fringes of the Star Trek and Star Wars fandoms and makes it super-hard to participate in the Harry Potter and MLP fandoms sometimes.

If we want 'everything to be awesome', they must be products of our heart as well as our mind. Once we stop having fun, then it becomes a chore, not recreation anymore.

I just saw the movie today and, well, that's the message and the life lesson that I got from that experience.