7. Is There A New Death Star?
The lack of a Death Star in the trailer is a big gap. It's very prominent on the poster, and it might be where Kylo Ren is conducting his operations from, yet there's no sweeping wide shots of any big, conspicuous and malevolent-looking construction projects in the galaxy during the trailer. We do see a snowy mountainscape over which X-Wings battle TIE Fighters through which runs the kind of long, straight trench that was characteristic of the old Death Stars, but it's blink-and-you'll-miss-it stuff. Then again, it might be something else: the official Star Wars website added a bit of info to its databanks a little while ago to include some information on a "Starkiller Base" (presumably the base stuffed with Stormtroopers in the trailer), which is described 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." Some fan sites have speculated that the Starkiller Base even draws its energy from the centre of the planet it's built onto. So, not content with building a moon-sized weapon, the First Order have taken to weaponising entire planets. In a sense, then there probably is a new Death Star in The Force Awakens, but in practice it's more like about twenty new Death Stars bolted together and turned into a sort of quasi-home planet for Stormtroopers. Then again it might not be a First Order weapon at all: one of the big rumours is that Domhnall Gleeson's character General Hux defected from the Resistance to the First Order after the Resistance built their own version of the Death Star. The weapon on the poster is, after all, positioned on the right-hand side of the poster along with all the other Resistance characters. There's an outside chance that it's just a colossal version of that floating droid which bips Luke with lasers when he's trying to learn how to use the Force in A New Hope, but I wouldn't stick the mortgage on it.