ST Tidbits from TFA that had unfulfilled potential...

They should all have a name like Porkins.

Where is the justice for fat people being called fat-ist names.

I know, I know, it was 1977. Different time.

 

Snoke wasn't a bad name on paper. It became bad when Leia uttered it on screen. It didn't even sound villainous. Then it just sounded silly.

 

Poe and Finn’s bromance, especially given what the two characters represent, as the ex-Stormtrooper and the best pilot in the Resistance.

I think the bromance could have been way more interesting in retrospect if it was building to a tragic conflict between the two, like if they realise they have fundamental different philosophies about how to deal with the FO (with Finn being more sympathetic to his fellow child-soldiers). And I think their friendship prevailing in the end could have been more instrumental to the purpose of the entire FO/Resistance story.

I think we could have built up more of Poe’s almost fanatical hatred of the FO given all his fallen comrades, and maybe family members. Some of the stuff he says (“The Resistance will not be intimidated,” “burn the FO to the ground”) does have an air of extremism to it.

 

I agree. Poe should have gone with Finn on his adventure in TLJ.

That being said, though their arcs in TLJ weren’t the most substantive things they coulda done with them, I find that whatever they gave them in TROS to be way more useless.

Poe was a spice-runner? So what? There are other stormtrooper defectors? So what?

 

Finn: Still having dreams about his time in the FO. Might have anger issues, or trouble dealing with all of his ingrained automatic programming/training which still exists. Since he no longer wants to run (post TFA) he wants revenge against Kylo and the FO for what they did to him, his family, and all the others out there, and to Rey.

Poe: A bit brash, showy, sarcastic. Doesn't see the big picture just yet. Hates the FO with a fiery passion, and is idealistic about restoring the NR.

Poe takes Finn under his wing to show him the ropes. Show what the Resistance is actually fighting for. To rebuild the Republic. Shows him how all the propaganda he's known is false.

Finn teaches Poe how to be a leader. Getting him to understand that the millions of faceless stormtroopers are actually ... humans. Slaves. Kidnapped kids just like Finn. Maybe he inspires Poe to realize that instead of just fighting for the next decade, and losing more people on both sides, and planets being blown up, they could end the war now, by turning or freeing the stormtroopers. Finn then uses his new found understanding about freedom, and comes up with a plan to lead a stormtrooper rebellion. You could even make it so other troopers out there have already broken their programming, and are forming an underground movement, and are passing on the legend of Finn - the first one to break his programming.

And since Poe is now the one with The Plan, and understands this personally in a way no one else does, this makes him new leader. It makes him the new Leia, or at least ready to step up and lead the Resistance once she's gone. Hell, this could all take place during her coma, so that there's this sense of dread, that there's no one to lead the Resistance anymore and they're doomed. When Leia goes into her coma, maybe half the ships are ready to flee, the dream is over, and Poe pulls them all together with this new plan.

 

Rewriting the ST aside, I still hope they fulfil some of the potential through other media.

For instance, you can still tell a Poe/Finn story with them dealing with FO remnants and Finn’s old comrades (set before or after TROS).

They could even give Phasma the Maul/Boba Fett treatment, surviving her fall (every trilogy has one). Just imagine if she’s now burned head to toe, if not fused with her iconic armor. She could be leading a band of fanatical FO survivors, living out in the wild, Col Kurtz style.

We can still get a Finn/Rey story, with an awkward and fun master/Padawan relationship. (I think these guys eventually getting married would be adorable).

Even more so than with the PT/Clone Wars fleshing out relationships, I feel the actual definitive stories for these new ST characters have yet to be told.

 

Totally agree on this post.
Looking back on TFA, just watching it, it does seem like certain parts don't mesh and other parts are amazing and could lead somewhere very interesting (Vader helmet and who is fooling Kylo/Rey's parentage). Unfortunately we didn't go to where I was hoping to. We did get new adventures..we did get the original characters back..we had some good emotional scenes. It's just so much was hampered due to the story and where it started (Luke in exile, Han has to die, Leia is rusty acting). We never got the big three all together on the Falcon one last time. We didn't get Rey being a former padawan and Kylo was the one who saved her. It just didn't pan out and the story we got was thrown together and us fans can tell. I do love TFA and it jump started the franchise big time so a lot to be thankful for.

 

Even after watching it recently, it's really hard for to identify any real potential, considering how inherently flawed it was from the beginning. I mean, TFA itself sabotages it's own potential.

The First Order as something other than just another Empire. It's not there at all, what's there is absolutely just another Nazi parade with another impossibly gigantic and expensive superweapon, but man, a terrorist guerrilla group would have been so much more logical, and so much cooler. It would have flipped the script on the rebels, and opened up so much design potential for the First Order. There's a lot of thematic work to squeeze out of the New Republic becoming the big, slow, ungainly machine, having to deal with not only a mobile, ragtag group of guerrilla fighters, but fanatical terrorists. Obviously a ton of real world relevance, and it would have been neat to flip the Galactic Empire as nuke wielding America into the Republic as American "liberators" in way over their heads. I think even Lucas would have gotten a kick out of that. Even the idea of the First Order being a bunch of Nazis in Argentina never comes close to actually making it on screen. If hiding Nazis were to make a play, they wouldn't do what the First Order did, and not just because they wouldn't be able to.


Vader's helmet has been mentioned several times. I'm not interested in how it was recovered, that's trivial. I hate the whole Vader worship angle altogether, but I also recognize that it was just dropped. A scene of Vader showing Kylo the power of darkness (maybe it's a trick, it's actually Palpatine, whatever), some kind of satanic ritual, with Kylo getting high on it, might have been begged in TFA. I think it could mirror the Vader meditation chamber scenes in terms of creepiness. I cannot state how much I hate Kylo as a D&D inspired, chalk pentagram drawing, ironic edgelord Satanist, but it was a chance to be different, a chance to be seedy and pulpy, rather than Kylo just being an utterly generic temper tantrum throwing darksider. A darksider who gets mad, breaks things, and kills people? Wild! Something one could only come up with while tripping on LSD, surely.

 

TFA is a result of a studio who are just interested in the fastest return on investment, and a filmmaker devoid of creativity and cinematic intelligence.

 

Almost everything is unfilled potential. And that was on purpose. TFA is vague perfection. It hints at things just off screen, just yesterday, just tomorrow, but never really in front of us.

 

The Luke went missing looking for the first Jedi Temple line from Han. That alone opened up a world of possibilities. Possibilities that were all summarily executed at the beginning of TLJ.

 

You mean he went there to die and kill off the Jedi Order because he failed one time and there's no point in being a Jedi if you can't be a perfect Jedi didn't live up to its potential.

Say it ain't so.

 

Which is not to say that the right director and writer could not have found a way to tell a follow-up story that met that potential.

 

That's the unfilled part. And JJ thought:

A: RJ would and actually did fill in the potential
B: If RJ didn't fill in the potential someone else would in EP 9, or videogame, book or comic, or cereal box.

 

Johnson had pretty much the same opportunity to recover the ST as Abrams did with TROS. I think most of us just hoped that the ST would find it's mojo and recover the potential of a direct sequel to the OT, and that featured Luke, Leia and Han. It was all squandered.

 

+ 1

Half of the drive of TFA is that the good guys and bad guys are searching for Luke. TLJ renders this absolutely pointless.

 

Rian Johnson

 

TFA needed no help from TLJ to do this. The central hook from the opening crawl is all about finding Luke. But about 50 min into TFA it decides it’s not longer about that but the threat of SK Base instead: Unlike the original Star Wars which was wise enough to bring up the DEATH STAR and the stolen plans in the opening crawl, TFA never picks a central question. It starts out being about the map that could lead to Luke Skywalker... until Han and Starkiller Base pop up and take over the movie.

The 'map to skywalker' is completely disconnected from the threat of SK Base which renders Luke’s map whereabouts moot. But contrast, in ANH the Luke/Han/Leia/Chewie's adventures on the Death Star are very much connected to saving Leia and delivering the plans that are vital to the destruction the DS, our central hook.

And once you introduce the scale of a plot device like a planet-killing weapon, you can't go back to the map plot until you blow Starkiller up. So your initial Luke question that was important to everyone is forgotten and HAS to be put on hold.

And how does JJ Abrams resolve this story dilemma? He has a legacy character pop out of a coma in the 11th hour to hand the resolution to the heroes on a platter. In light of this, TLJ really has no reason to be beholden to the ‘urgent Luke’ macguffin that set the story in motion because the last movie couldn’t make up its own mind about it anyway. It chose the more interesting character-based rather route than plot or lore based one


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You make some good points.
Although once SKB is destroyed we still go back to the search for Luke. I agree that ANH does it much more organically, for sure, but I don’t see why both plot elements can’t exist outside each other.

And Rey’s character arc, the protagonist arc, still leads her to Luke. She dreams about Ach-To, she is called to by the Skywalker saber and sees him in her force vision. While fighting, Kylo demands the Skywalker saber and offers to train her, Rey defeats him and delivers the saber to Luke on Ach-To, hoping to be trained. TLJ vaguely acknowledges this - “I need someone to show me my place in all of this” but Luke rejects her and she ultimately ends up trying to find it with Kylo after all instead.

And it was TLJ that decided Luke won’t join the fight. Going by TFA Luke helping against the FO was just as important as destroying SKB.

I do agree TROS (and TLJ) are both vitally lacking in lore.

 

After TFA I think I had no real illusions about Han, Luke and Leia being together. I feel like that's a fan want moreso. A flaw of TFA, but not one I think effects TLJ in that much of way, all by itself. As is everything to me with TLJ, I think RJ makes choices, like JJ did, and individually of his own accord based on his own reactions, fails TLJ, thus hindering the trilogy from the middle instead of the front like I think JJ did, and in different ways in some areas, but similar in others.