Star Wars: The Last Jedi Teaser Trailer Review

As you may have guessed, I have been anticipating a Star Wars trailer breakdown for quite some time. I watched it the first time as was pumped as you can imagine. But after the 6th or 7th consecutive view, analyzing each shot, I couldn’t help to feel like something was all too familiar. And I don’t mean because I just saw it, I’m talking about major glitch-in-the-matrix/ Deja-vu. Like I’ve seen all of this before.

At first, I thought that one of the locations looked oddly familiar from the opening scene of Star Trek: Into Darkness. But then, I figured out what it was, and I was overcome with disappointment. And that is really hard to do to someone who will openly defend the prequels!

So, as much as I would love to doodle over screencaps and over-speculate, I have to scrap my entire original post in pursuit of the real story: They re-hashed, or dare I say PLAGERIZED the teaser trailers from The Force Awakens!

Now, I have no doubt in my mind that The Last Jedi will be great and differ from The Force Awakens, but knowing how secretive and meticulous in detail Lucasfilm has been, there is no possible way they did not intentionally edit the footage from The Last Jedi to look exactly like The Force Awakens!

I present to you my evidence in the form of side-by-side screencaps. Here’s the thing, though, I will even limit my side-by-sides to the The Force Awakens teasers, and not even bring up the comparisons I found from the 3rd trailer.

NOTE: The Last Jedi is on the left, and The Force Awakens is on the right.

Trailer talk:

Luke voices over the teasers.

Dialogue from the Original Trilogy is spliced faintly into the background.

Luke: "What do you see?" vs. Snoke: "have you felt it?"

Rey: "Light... and Darkness" vs. Snoke: "The Dark side... and the Light"

Visual Similarities/Mirrors:

Teaser opens with Rey vs. Finn panting out of breath:

Shot of Rey vs. Finn standing, back towards camera, over a sea vs. sea of sand:

Broken helmets from the previous movie:

This shot I like, though, because it hints that we’ll see more of what Luke has been doing, but it’s just an alternate shot of the same scene:

Here’s Captain Phasma walking exactly the same, walking menacingly towards the camera:

Three ships are flying low, skimming the ground:

Same ships flying low, skimming the ground but in formation:

Hangar of redesigned classic ships explosions:

Kylo Ren is attacking the audience:

BB-8 is rolling his ball off toward the camera:

A mysterious orange hand, holding an old Jedi relic:

Here’s the nail in the coffin. The Millenium Falcon is zipping through the sky while being pursued by two TIE Fighters, shooting at it (point blank and missing, too.). Again, it looks like it’s an alternate shot of the same scene:

There are more similarities if I brought in the third trailer for The Force Awakens, like: the trailer opening with what seems to be stars but it’s actually just something right in front of Rey’s face, Leia vs. Han encompassed by a space map hologram, and Poe’s X-wing blows up right before he and BB-8 can get in it, and Luke’s line, “Reach out” vs. Maz’s line, “Just let it in”.

All of these shots are framed the same and in the end, we still have next to no information about what’s going on, who’s doing what, and why anyone’s doing anything.

I am mostly just really annoyed at this because once the hype settles down, there’s still nothing. For a 2-minute “teaser”, we were teased only three things: 1. Luke’s one truth, 2. A-Wings are back, baby, and 3. This is the FIRST CANONICAL APPEARANCE OF PAPER!

That wasn’t a joke! There seriously hasn’t been a single sheet of paper on film, or in the animated series!

So, what would I have preferred? I’m not going to highlight a problem without a solution in mind, of course!

With The Force Awakens, I said that all they needed to do to pump the fans up was show us the text that would be the opening crawl. With The Last Jedi, I would’ve just wanted to see something akin to the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 teaser. Just show a short, minute-long scene, like a portion of Luke training Rey, or a BB-8 shenanigan.

Over all, I’m pretty disappointed with the teaser. The one for season Four of Rebels didn’t show much of anything either, so for now, we just have to keep going crazier and crazier with who Snoke might be.

HOLY CRAP! It literally just dawned on me, SNOKE IS YODA’S FATHER!!!