Via Yahoo.com:

J.J. Abrams wants you know he hates doing commentary tracks. And with that, he kicks off his commentary track for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The director’s moment-by-moment, detailed analysis is, despite his protestations, perhaps the biggest selling point of the four-disc Force Awakens 3D collector’s edition that’s hitting stores on Nov. 15. The set is a marked improvement over the version released last spring, including all the previously released features with several new bells and whistles. Yahoo Movies took an early copy of the set for a spin and spent hours poring over the bonus material, paying close attention to what the filmmaker had to say. Here are 27 things we just had to share, in chronological order.

Abrams considers the entire film a love letter to George Lucas and the original Star Wars, a.k.a. A New Hope.
Throughout the film, he points out callbacks and homages to Lucas’s oeuvre, beginning with the Lucasfilm logo, opening crawl, and initial shot of Kylo Ren’s Star Destroyer obscuring Jakku. “We went backwards to go forwards,” says Abrams. “We embraced wholeheartedly the brilliant iconography of Ralph McQuarrie, the concept artist who worked with George… The idea was to give people that feeling of instantly being back in Star Wars.”

Later on, Abrams seems to address critics who felt The Force Awakens was a retread by saying he intentionally called back settings like the Mos Eisley Cantina (Maz’s castle) and the Death Star (Starkiller Base) because they are “fundamental, prerequisite elements” of the Star Wars universe, as essential as saloons and dusty streets are to Westerns or castles are to fairy tales.

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