J.J. Abrams Promises Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker Won’t Rehash Return Of The Jedi

J.J. Abrams is returning to that galaxy far, far away for Star Wars: The Rise of the Skywalker, completing the trilogy he started back in 2015 with The Force Awakens. Episode VII was a hugely successful movie on all accounts, but there was a certain backlash from fans – when isn’t there? – who claimed it was little more than a remake of A New Hope. Given that, there might be some worry that Abrams will do the same with Episode IX and base it off Return of the Jedi.

It seems the director is aware of these complaints and fears, though, and is here to promise us that Rise won’t just rehash old elements. While speaking to Fandango, Abrams defended the criticisms of TFA, pointing out that many of the similarities between it and ANH simply come from narrative conventions.

“We’ve gotten a lot of flack for people saying, ‘Oh, Force Awakens was just a remake of New Hope,’ and while that was something that obviously was never the intention, it was about introducing new characters [and] using the old, and there’s a natural sense in any hero’s journey of certain tenants will come to play.”

Apparently, Abrams and his team listened to the fans and went into Rise with the intention of making sure it wasn’t so influenced by a single entry in the saga. Instead, as the filmmaker has stressed before, it’ll act as a conclusion to the entire franchise to date, so it was really about tying these movies together rather than remaking one of them.

“We very much wanted to make sure that we were not somehow inadvertently being so influenced by one thing, however the job of this film is to be the end of nine films. So we can’t ignore the fact that we come from Episodes I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VI, and VIII. So it wasn’t about, ‘Let’s choose that one. Let’s do a riff on that,’ it was more, ‘How do these stories culminate,’ and that was our job.”

It’s good to hear Abrams strove for originality with the pic, even though the recent trailer did suggest some key callbacks to Episode VI. Most noticeably, the ruins of what appears to be the Death Star II on Endor. Then there was the laugh of the apparently-resurrected Emperor Palpatine, last seen plunging to his death in RotJ. But there was always going to be some symmetry. As George Lucas once memorably said about the Star Wars films, “it’s like poetry. They rhyme.”

Every saga has an end, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will provide that when it hits theaters on December 20th.