It’s been confirmed that Andy Serkis provides the narration for the trailer. That being the case, I’m going out on a limb (not a particularly treacherous one, granted) and theorizing that he’s playing a CGI character. No, not just because that’s his thing — I quite like his non-CGI presence and would love to see him as Andy Serkis in just about anything — but because that voice he’s doing does not sound like something that would go with his actual physiology. Obviously, it does, but it doesn’t seem natural, doesn’t? If we saw him doing that voice out of his normal self, even alien-ed up, it wouldn’t seem right. In order for that voice to sound natural, it almost has to be the voice of a character that doesn’t correspond to Andy Serkis’s human self.

This isn’t new information, of course, but it does seem to corroborate that he’s playing a CGI character.

Does that mean he’s playing an alien, an altered human, a cyborg, or something else? I have no idea. But it doesn’t sound like he’s playing a good guy, in any case. If he is playing a good guy, someone get the poor fellow a cough drop.

I’m actually very excited about the Star Wars trailer. It’s new and fresh, exciting and tense, all the things the prequels weren’t. There’s no Jar Jar, no fart jokes (I’m looking at you, Phantom Menace) — at least, not yet. JJ Abrams still has time to insert a few. But I don’t think he will. They wouldn’t fit the tone of this trailer. He’s doing his usual tense, highly watchable shtick, but applying it to Star Wars.

I have many reservations about him handling SW, but I have strangely high hopes, as well. He created and wrote the pilot for LOST, which is one of my favorite television shows of all time, if not the favorite, and that pilot was brilliant. As a director, he knows how to create tension and movement. I actually kind of hated his Star Trek movies — especially the second one — but that’s because they just didn’t feel like Star Trek. They’d lost their vibe, their soul. JJ doesn’t love Star Trek, though, and he loves Star Wars.

Here’s hoping he does an awesome job.