Point of View

Point of View

Third-Person Omniscient

It's pretty hard to escape third-person omniscient when you're telling a story about the Force. It's everywhere and everything, which means that we, the privileged audience, get to zoom back and forth between characters and places as often as the story needs us to. In fact, the characters sometimes have a hard time keeping up since changing acts requires them to throw their gear into their space ships and zip off to the next planet.

All that zipping illustrates one of the big narrative techniques that all the Star Wars movies have used: cross-cutting. As a way of upping the excitement and generating suspense, the film will regularly switch back and forth between the characters: for example, between Han and Finn with the Resistance and Rey in the clutches of Kylo Ren. It ensures that we don't get bored and helps the filmmakers juggle all of those characters without testing our patience. It also means that third-person omniscient is the only way to go since doing anything else would throw one too many gear changes into a movie that's already full of them.