ST What do you think of the concept of the First Order?

i quite liked it.. i immediately thought it had something to do with order 66 and this was all part of the original plan.. the original plan.. the first order and i was fine with the Imperial iconography as they had Imperial remnant in the EU.. it also illustrated the ongoing old Republic /Empire /new Republic /First order complexities about how an entire galaxy could be run together in peace.. its that ideal that The sith and Palpatine can not abide at any cost and it has to be controlled centrally before finally being destroyed

 

I might be pretty critical of the ST, but I'm fine with the First Order. It makes sense that the Empire would regroup and strike when the New Republic least expects it. I would prefer if there was no Starkiller Base and that's not even going into the Final Order and how Palpatine figures into it.

If anything, I think it would have been better if they were a clear cut fringe group that pooled their assets together and used unprecedented strategy to either reclaim or even coopt the New Republic.

 

In theory it makes sense, but its origins and how it managed to acquire such strength should have been explored in the movies. If you want to do a reboot of the Empire vs Rebels scenario, it needs to be plausible but the ST didn't feel that that was important. Personally I think it should never have risen from the ashes of the Empire. If Ep 7 had opened instead with a cold war scenario between the remnants of the empire and the NR that would have been dramatic and at least a little bit different.

 

The FO made sense until TROS.

 

A bad concept at the start in that it's basically Empire 2.0 with no philosophical differences, plus an ersatz Emperor as its figurehead. Now if it was an organization set up deliberately to lure in old Imperial supporters, with somebody else (and NOT just a Palpatine retread) pulling the strings, that might be interesting. But nothing of that sort was implied in TFA.

JJ Abrams' film was a hollow shell, with the interior left unfinished for somebody else more interested in actually saying something new. JJ loves his mystery boxes, but he's not very interested in actually opening that box and showing what's inside. Original storytelling certainly isn't his strength. In this case he was content to recycle the Empire-versus-Rebels setup from the OT, and leave the generation of new ideas that could invigorate this setup to others.

But that requires the person doing the next movie to actually want to flesh out a previously shallow premise. It requires a remodeller's instinct for improving what's already there. But Rian Johnson thought Snoke was so boring that he killed him off without ever fleshing out his backstory. An understandable impulse.

And then JJ came back and decided that hey, this Empire II: Electric Boogaloo controlled by a bargain-basement Palpatine was actually a front for the real undead Palpatine after all. Which makes no sense. If Palpatine was alive this whole time, why not rule the FO himself and rally the old Imperial loyalists to his cause? It makes no sense. Worse, it illustrates plainly how Snoke was never anything more than a poor man's Emperor - because if he wasn't compelling enough to bring back somehow in TROS, why waste two movies with him as the Big Bad?

 

QFT. Both filmmakers have their plus points, and I think they are capable of making better Star Wars films, but they (especially Abrams IMO) aren’t the best fit for stories/films that need to be connected. Both would have been better suited to anthology films, where they could have been their ‘own thing’. And I totally agree that, IMO, TFA was so lacklustre in terms of new concepts/world building, that it effectively required the next filmmaker to redefine it all... and rather than Johnson running with it (regardless of how lacking it may have been), he kind of just tries to flip it all, and I’m not convinced that’s what the ST needed.