Star Wars: The Last Jedi - 11 Major New Details Revealed By EW

7. The Empire Strikes Back Parallels

After The Force Awakens so closely mirrored A New Hope, it's been widely expected that The Last Jedi would do the same with The Empire Strikes Back. They do "rhyme", after all.

That feeling was compounded by the first teaser trailer, which showed Luke training Rey, similar to his own training with Yoda, and the Battle of Crait echoing the Battle of Hoth, while there have been comments about it being darker. Johnson, however, insists they were largely unintentional parallels:

"I just tried to kind of ignore that aspect of it and have the story take the shape that it needed to. But look, Rey is off in a remote location with a Jedi master, and the Resistance is in a tough spot, and we’re intercutting those stories. By its very nature, there are some structural parallels. But these are new characters, they’re dealing with new things, and that ultimately is what defines the movie. So I think that’s going to be unique.”

That's a fair point, really. George Lucas created those rhyming structural beats, and it's difficult to avoid hitting at least some of them. And, for all it was similar to A New Hope in many regards, J.J. Abrams also introduced some great new characters and concepts, which Johnson can build upon in different ways here.