re: Oscar Isaac: On Star Wars VIII "It feels like we're making an independent film"

I think what he means is it's smaller in scale. I think a large portion of the movie will simply focus on Rey and Kylo's training with Luke and Snoke respectively, while the First Order goes after the Resistance, as the rest of the galaxy falls into chaos with no more central government.

Really, I don't know how they're going to do an opening title crawl unless they start the movie with characters that had nothing to do with TFA plot, because it clearly has to take off the second the last one left us. So in that manner, it will be like Empire, but I don't expect any grand battle in the movie.