Last week, the Star Wars brain trust revealed the first trailer for their upcoming eighth episode, The Last Jedi. It was moody stuff, building on the visual touchstones of The Force Awakens but seemingly upping the operatic scale, complete with a moody intonation from the elderly Skywalker that it was time for the Jedi to end. (This assertion was, inevitably, a cause for people to be mad online.)
However, if something seemed a tad… familiar about it all, well, that may have been intentional. A new edit juxtaposes The Last Jedi’s trailer with comparable footage from The Force Awakens, and, well, you decide:
To be clear, this isn’t the original Force Awakens trailer, just a re-edited assemblage of shots from it. But they’re still playing with the same visual touchstones in much the same way, like the reintroduction of a wobbly Millennium Falcon or the shattered Darth Vader mask. The Force Awakens movie was widely criticized as a beat-by-beat remake of A New Hope, but this edit suggests that the reassembling of old ingredients into new formulations will continue.
Or that, you know, they’re both Star Wars movies and these are just trailers. Hey, Poe looks handsome, right?