Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Echoes of previous scenes in a new teaser

For all the insistence that Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be new, it’s impossible not to feel a sense of familiarity with the newest teaser.

With the most recent piece of marketing from Star Wars: The Last Jedi, yours truly looked at all the different ways the image called back to earlier films. Perhaps that release ahead of this new teaser (with a tip of the hat to Star Wars News Net) was intentional, because for all that some of the names and faces are new, this reminds us of a couple scenes from earlier films.

While SWNN runs down everything that’s fresh here, it’s hard not to focus in on, as SWNN does, the scene Rey and Luke share, where Rey says, “Kylo failed you. I won’t.” Although SWNN hasn’t done a deep-dive analysis, let’s take a look, shall we?

Just from these few seconds, it doesn’t seem like it’s quite at the same level of Luke Skywalker insisting that he can still complete training with Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back — Rey’s more flat-out insistent and doesn’t make any appeals to any Force ghosts that may or may not be around there. But it’s not hard to get the feeling that Luke might remember that he, too, once had to insist on becoming a Jedi. Although the characters themselves might not know this tidbit, we as fans also remember that Anakin faces similar difficulties in the prequel trilogy, with the Council insisting that he’s too old.

(As Anakin’s general … Anakin-ness … certainly didn’t help the galaxy, maybe the Council was right. But then we wouldn’t have Star Wars movies or a story at all, and frankly, that’s not the kind of world we as fans want to live in.)

Just as Rey is not Luke, though, Luke is not Yoda — but Luke and Yoda now share the trauma of loss, something Mark Hamill has mentioned. So, while the fans might have the feeling that this will just rehash what we’ve seen before, Rian Johnson seems insistent that things will change, at least a little bit. We suppose that that’s true from a certain point of view, to make the inevitable allusion.

JoBlo Movie Trailers has posted it:

Next: What's the deal with The Last Jedi?

Does that mean that Rian Johnson is Obi-Wan Kenobi? What does that make J.J. Abrams, then?