11 Ways Star Wars: The Last Jedi Was Basically The Empire Strikes Back

2. A Jedi Hopeful In Training From A Reluctant Master

One of the most obvious reflections between part two of the original trilogy and part two of the newest is that it was clear from the outset that Rey was going to spend time learning from her own Jedi Master. It should have been clear from the previous film that he would be at least somewhat reluctant, and both the trailers and some very interesting comments from Mark Hamill made it increasingly clear that this was the case. So, again our young Force-sensitive hero was going to learn from a reluctant Jedi. This is, of course, just like The Empire Strikes Back, in which Yoda needs persuasion from the Force ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi before he begins to take Luke on. Luke was too old, he was impatient, he had lived his life looking for the apparently non-Jedi lures of adventure and excitement.

Another powerful link between the two training sequences is the questionable timing. In both films, the time spent in Jedi training appears to be weeks or months, while the that passes in the rest of the films appears to be days at most. There are always sci-fi explanations for this, and they have been around for The Empire Strikes Back for decades - but they aren't present in the films themselves. You may wonder if Rian Johnson got away with this in The Last Jedi purely as an homage to Empire?