ST The Development Of The Sequel Trilogy

(Actually, outside the context of the ST and its characters, the gffa NEEDS this angsty padawan fanfic

Someone write it pls thnx )

*ahem*

Many fans would be surprised how wonderfully-executed “predictable” concepts can be executed.

 

This just now made me realize that an entire third of the saga franchise was (due to the nature of a prequel) entirely predictable. And as many complaints as the PT gets, predictability is rarely a voiced complaint. If any franchise can survive predictable stories, it's Star Wars.

 

The only time she ever even got angry enough to do dark side stuff was when Kylo tried to take Chewbacca.

 

No, she showed a lot of instances where she 'flirted' with the Dark Side so to speak.
When she fought Kylo on Starkiller, she stalked him after knocking him down....exactly like Anakin did with Obi Wan during their final battle on Mustafa.

In TLJ when Kylo extended his hand to her she responded by reaching for a weapon, despite him not showing any threat towards her. He had even fought Snoke's guards with her just before.

She seemed to take a real pleasure in shooting down TIE fighters without even once considering they might be stolen brainwashed children like her best friend.

She attacked Finn on Jakku without provocation, hit Luke from behind, and in TROS twice attacked Kylo when he was unarmed.

Rey showed plenty of potential to 'go dark', which is why I was left so baffled by her suddenly turning into such a pure paragon of virtue at the end. Luke fought the dark side and won in ROTJ, but it made him a good Jedi, not a saint. And Luke was shown really struggling, but ultimately overcoming, his dark side.

JJ intended Rey to be a female Luke....but her character wasn't a patch on his. Throughout the OT right to the very end you could empathise with Luke. But by the end of TROS I couldn't relate to Rey at all. In fact, I felt more empathy for Kylo Ren. And you're supposed to leave the cinema rooting for the 'good guy/girl'!

 

I'd rather would like to read an article (series) about this stuff. Why do people only make videos on Youtube without even at least some transcripts about this. It's frustrating

 

I don't want to believe that JJ is THAT evil...

 

In terms of timing of statements - does this guy know that statements from interviews can be released ages after the interviews actually took place? And that the creatives in question may have said things in said interviews that were not published despite bring necessary context to what was published?

 

I guess he is working with what he knows.

 

He clearly doesn’t know what he doesn’t know if he thinks that the publication dates and contents of published interviews can be relied on as accurately reflecting what was said and when.

I’ve made these mistakes before.

 

I think some of it is true, but yeah, this guy seemed to think JJ was some kind of dark lord that had the power to control literally everything and everyone involved with the sequels.

 

This, this, and this. Which is why it is such a miracle that, somehow, out of all of this mess TLJ wound up as good as it is.

Man, all I want out of Star Wars now is to see what Johnson can do with a clean slate for his own trilogy if/when it happens.

 

This guy clearly has no idea how the industry works or how movies are made.

 

Let's look at the context of Star Wars before the ST. The OT was a story about a group of characters that took place during the context of a Galactic Civil War. The Original Trilogy starts AFTER the war has started and it ends BEFORE the war has ended. We see the main parts of the war as told through the eyes of our characters, but we don't see the first days or the final days of the conflict.

Then we get the PT that tells a story of the previous generation. We get to see the events that took the galaxy from an age of relative peace to an age of darkness. This means that we have to use the context of what we see in I-III to fill in the blanks about what occurred between episodes III and IV. Obviously a large section of the galaxy formed a Rebellion that rose up against this terrible Empire.

So it would make sense for the ST to tell the story of the next generation (after the OT) and their adventures with a galaxy that is becoming accustomed to heading back toward an age of peace. And I'm guessing everyone who worked on the story had the exact same thought; HOW DO WE GET CONFLICT FROM THAT?

 

Yeah, but after war there's still a lot of conflict. After WW2 came the Cold War, so taking down the Empire wasn't the end of the story.

They could've have explored, and I think they would've explored, the mystic side of the force in a decent ST. Why does the dark side keep coming back? What's the true nature of the Force and how do we bring definitive peace to the Galaxy?

Imagine a St where our heroes are desperately searching for lost sacred books that teach ancient and forbidden knowledge about the Force. Stuff like how to save people from death (force healing), how to communicate across the stars (force skype) and other things. The possibilities were limiteless. The main character could've have finished Anakin's dream: to save beloved ones from dying. Yeah, Kylo does that in TROS but it is so poorly executed.

 

Oh, I'm not saying there's nothing there. I'm saying it seems like no one who was actually working on the ST could think of anything outside of copying the OT. I would have preferred to see an ST about the Imperial remnants refusing to go away, a Republic quickly sliding back into dictatorship type territory, a galaxy that doesn't fully trust the Jedi or "old Rebels" now in positions of political power. Honestly, I would have even brought the Emperor back as the driving villain for the entire saga and made creating an Empire just one step in his master plan as opposed to his endgame.

But unfortunately, it seems most fans have more creativity that the creators hired by Disney. Also, and this is just my opinion, I think it was stupid to not even attempt to use the old EU as a framework to create a trilogy out of. Getting rid of fan favorites like Mara Jade, Jaina and Jacen Solo, and several others only to replace them with the likes of Rey Skywalker and Kylo "Jacen Solo Lite" Ren was a dicey move for a company that had no long term goal in mind. They threw away over two decades worth of lore and replaced it with... well, a mystery box full of nothing.

 

I speculated before TFA that there might be a sort of cold war situation.

You have the NR, you have an Imperial remnant and you have a loose group of non-aligned worlds.
This third group is made up of systems that dislike the Empire to be sure but also don't trust the NR as they feel that the OR messed things up.

The NR is the largest and has the biggest production base, the Imps are more militarized and the third group has a clause for mutual defense but not much else. So there is a balance of power and someone is trying to upset it. To start a war that would be very costly to all sides.

TFA has many flaws but I still think you could have made something pretty good from it.
That EP VIII has the FO attach, because they can't let the NR gets it's forces together and mobilize as then they would get crushed.
The NR is still there and is trying to organize it's remaining forces and defend itself.
So a war between two sides that both suffered a significant loss but can fight.

But instead we got a FO that is many times more powerful than before and the rest of the galaxy apparently won't fight.

TFA sold me on the characters but had holes in the world building and plot. TLJ made the character worse and did not fix any of the world building and plot problems and instead added more.

Bye for now.
Old Stoneface

 

I think most of us are comfortable with the concept of a 'cold war' or a remnant of the Empire fighting a guerrilla type war against the New Republic, which is (it seems) something left over from the Lucas treatments. But I don't believe we got that in any of the ST films. The Mandalorian is probably closer to that concept. The problem is, IMHO, the timeframe within which the ST occurs. The 'cold war' or 'guerilla war' type concept is probably best suited to events that immediately follow ROTJ, whereas circa 30 years later, one would expect events/situations to move on. So rather than present that original post ROTJ dynamic in the ST, Abrams opts for a perfectly formed 'resistance' and a perfectly formed First Order... which looks and feels way too close to what we had in the OT. And Abrams just isn't a good enough filmmaker to have the nuances/subtleties play out in a manner where this dynamic feels markedly different/new, but familiar enough that it still feels like Star Wars.

 

I mean, the US-Soviet cold war lasted what, 38 years, when the SU was finally dissolved. We could have seen the last few days of this ever-growing tense stalemate era. Half the galaxy is NR. Half is the Imps. (which is a cool nickname the NR-fighters could give them). And the systems living in the middle along the border. And then yeah, some is purposefully trying to restart a war, get both sides fighting again. Pretty simple concept and all it would have taken is 1-3 lines of exposition. lol

 

I was kinda digging the idea of a power vacuum and the criminal underworld's attempts to usurp power.

 

I think the ST would have had much more coherance if TFA had started at that point i.e. the last days of the 'Galactic Cold War', two sides suing for peace, two sides powering down their super weapons... then the 'peace process' is betrayed by whomever the antagonists of the ST would be.

 

So early on they were gonna have another plot in the film where they went to find the creator of the millennium falcon who was to be played by Judi dench, so they could upgrade the ship.

Who knows whether that were gonna be in place of the C3PO stuff or whether they wanted to do both.