Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Trailer Confirms Return to Death Star II

Star Wars fans were treated to the final trailer for The Rise of Skywalker today, and it’s safe to say that it was a doozy. The new footage teased a pretty epic showdown for Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), which is set to honor the movies of the “Skywalker Saga” that came before it. Fans are safely expecting some callbacks to the original and prequel trilogy of films, especially with Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) set to return in this final chapter. Fans, including Twitter user @snrkjj, have pointed out one pretty epic homage — that Rey and Kylo’s fight appears to be definitely taking place within the ruins of the second Death Star, right down to the throne room that Anakin and Luke Skywalker fought on in Return of the Jedi.

Fans have speculated almost since the first trailer debuted that the Death Star II would be factoring into the film, but that detail was never officially confirmed. And while it’s unclear exactly what the circumstances are of Rey and Kylo’s showdown, the sequence already serves as a pretty great homage to where the franchise began.

“Our movie was not just following what we had started [with The Force Awakens], it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else [with Star Wars: The Last Jedi]. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies,” Abrams shared in an interview back in April. “While there are some threads of larger ideas and some big-picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing Episode VII, the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run, was an enormous challenge.”

“It was the most fun it’s been. There was just an energy and a looseness and excitement to the whole production,” Oscar Isaac, who plays Poe Dameron in the franchise, shared in an interview earlier this year. “And knowing that this was the conclusion of not only our time there but the nine stories, these nine episodes of the Skywalker Saga, it’s incredible. And I think people are gonna be just blown away.”

Are you excited to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker return to Death Star II? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will be released on December 20th.