'The Force Awakens' Drops Double Dose of Hollywood's Favorite Clichéd Line

Kevin Polowy
·Senior Correspondent, Yahoo Entertainment

(Warning: Minor Force Awakens spoilers below.)

At this point, the many callbacks and Easter Eggs nestled within Star Wars: The Force Awakens have been well-documented. In addition to including nods to franchise favorites like the cantina, the trash compactor, and Jedi training remotes, director J.J. Abrams and company also couldn’t help but include what’s become one of the most famous lines in contemporary film history: “We’ve got company.” And they do it twice.

That simple line of dialogue — shorthand for action heroes quickly ‘splaining that there are bad guys approaching — gained notoriety in 2010 when web talk-show host Guy Bauer mashed together a minute’s worth of movies that used the line and its variations (watch the video above). Many outlets soon claimed that it was “the most over-used line in film,” right up there with “You just don’t get it, do you?” and “You look like s—.”

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The line’s rampant use in movies seems to have become an in-joke for many filmmakers, especially in the years since it was exposed as a total cliché. When Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) said “I’ve got company!” in this summer’s Terminator Genisys, for instance, we had to think it was an homage to the time a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) used the infamous line in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Or at least, we hope it was.

We can say with some confidence that this was the case in The Force Awakens. Han Solo’s warning, “Luke, we’re going to have company” in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope remains one of the most famous uses of the line. (Though it wasn’t the earliest: According to one valiant researcher, the phrase’s colloquial use dates back to 1937 or 1940, while The Shortlist cited 1942’s Saboteur as the oldest example.)

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It takes Abrams and team only a few minutes of screen time to get it out of the way in The Force Awakens. “We’ve got company!” Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) tells Max von Sydow’s elder Lor San Tekka as First Order forces move in on the Jakku village in the opening sequence. Later, Dameron ups the ante when a flurry of First Order TIE fighters attack as Resistance squadrons are attempting to disable the planet-destroying superweapon. “Guys, we’ve got a lotta company,” he warns his fellow X-wing pilots.

Overkill? Maybe. But when it comes to overused phrases in film history, this line has a lot of company.