Kennedy, a longtime collaborator with Steven Spielberg, has known Abrams since he was 14 years old and doing a young movie nerd's dream job—watching and restoring the Super 8 films Spielberg made as a child. With a background like that, it's no wonder Abrams taps into the classic Hollywood moviemaking of that era, nor is it surprising that Kennedy saw him as the perfect candidate for The Force Awakens, persuading him to leave the Trek franchise and numerous other projects for what Abrams called "the first movie that blew my mind."

The Force Awakens is looking to blow audience's minds in the same way. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber noted of the film's most recent trailer, there's nothing going on here that audiences haven't seen before. Familiar faces, stormtroopers, X-Wings swooping around, all set to John Williams' score; this is the stuff of nostalgia, not the breath of fresh air the original Star Wars offered in 1977. Whatever new formula Abrams might be adding, it's certainly not apparent from the advertising, which is instead designed to remind everyone of the first time they saw Han and Chewie in the Millennium Falcon.

But there are indeed hints that Abrams is going to do more than just recycle Star Wars' greatest hits. When George Lucas made his maligned prequels, one of his biggest challenges was the great leaps in movie technology that took place between Return of the Jedi in 1983 and The Phantom Menace in 1999. How could that be reconciled with the fact that Phantom was set before the original trilogy? Lucas, to the dismay of critics, doubled down and used CGI and green screen for everything, embracing the fact that he could make the "Old Republic" look like an unblemished jewel, primed for the great downfall audiences knew would come. Abrams has wisely gone the other way, returning to the practical effects of the original films. When the Millennium Falcon loop-de-loops at the end of The Force Awakens' first teaser, the real thrill is the feeling that the camera is actually moving with it, rather than mimicking that feeling with the programmed virtual cinematography Lucas eventually leaned on.

With the second teaser's bravura opening shot, Abrams is communicating everything viewers need to know about his Star Wars world with the same tactical, brilliant economy of his Star Trek. Here's the Star Destroyer fans remember, but crumpled on a planet's surface; Darth Vader's mask, burned and disfigured; Luke Skywalker's artificial hand, its fake skin gone after all these years. Most importantly of all, there's the first lightsaber audiences ever saw in a Star Wars film, seemingly being put in Leia's hands, a small but powerful piece of imagery that signals an upending of the long-standing gender dynamics of the original series, as Salon's Sonia Saraiya noted.