How would you change the new Star Wars trilogy

Ath-kethin

Elder Thing
I’ll keep it simple: stick to the original plan. Use three different directors to do their own personal takes on Star Wars.
I really have to wonder how much of the

"holy naughty word!"

" . . . Haha just kidding!"

sections of TRoS came from Abrams trying to beat down Trevmorrow's script.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

sabrinathecat

Explorer
Ezra Bridger reaches out from the time tunnel, grabs Luke right before he was about to die, smacks him on the back of the head, tells him to wake up, and boots him out right before Darth Emo went bad to sort things out so that the whole so-called Sequel Trilogy can be relegated to "Legend" status. Someone with an actual understanding of Star Wars is put in charge. West End Games' rules are adopted as cannon for not just books, but ALL Star Wars.
Alternatively, Ezra Bridger reaches out from the time tunnel, grabs George Lucas by the throat, smacks him repeatedly across the face, and sends him back to before he sold to Disney. Instead, Lucas appoints a successor like Filoni to safeguard his legacy.
 


Maz should have had a bigger role and a better explanation of her role

This is a good point. In my opinion she should have had a bigger role in the second and third movie.

Knights of Ren-another wasted opportunity- a flashback or 2 of them and the knights should have killed a major character or damaged one.

I would have loved to see Rey and Luke team up against the Knights of Ren. Maybe Luke could come in at just the right moment to protect Rey. I would have loved to see a Jedi Knight elderly Luke kick butt, perhaps killing one of the knights in the process.

the story should have been written ahead of time. Tying this to roleplaying-Map out the entire adventure and read the adventure at least once.

Yup, that still amazes me. Disney has their hands on a multi-million dollar property and they don't plan out the whole story. But I suspect JJ may be to blame for this as well. It really feels like one of the later seasons of Lost.
 

Wolf72

Explorer
Just watched it tonight ... I'll take it, I like Star Wars, grew up on it (5 when IV came out). Will watch it again

Loved the characters (Finn and Rey are my favorites), but felt like it was a movie devoted to speed freaks who couldn't sit still, let alone read a book for more than .3 seconds. AHA: I felt like I was watching the (2nd?) Jason Bourne movie where all the fighting was lightning fast and it was easier to see bodies falling than hits landing.

What would I change? slow down the frames per second. I could (can) watch the original trilogy from now until the cows come home ... the new ones? I feel like someone thought that lighting every single firework off in rapid succession would look cooler.

Another change: actually give Wedge more than one screen shot, possibly some organizational influence.

+: more force ghosts and voices. (obi wan (alec or ewan); mace, others)
+: Purple Light Saber!!!! ok, her yellow one at the end: cool
+: actual space battle? ... wait, that goes with my frames per second

WEG rules for universe style? as much as they hearken back to the original trilogy.

Also was a fan of episode I-III's lightsaber battles (mostly, Anakin vs Doku not so much)
 

R_J_K75

Legend
Id have the Jedi/Sith, First/Last Order and the Resistance including every character in the franchise obliterated so it leaves it fresh and wide open for new stories. The sequel trilogy was a dumpster fire.
 

Okay, new idea.

Make the Titles Meaningful
If I were going to do a major rewrite of the trilogy, but still keep the same characters and the best plot beats, we go like this.

The Force Awakens
Multiple people develop Force sensitivity.

Lor San Tekka is father of Mara Jade, Luke's wife who died when the Knights of Ren attacked. Ben didn't 'turn to the Dark Side,' but rather was kidnapped, because the First Order wants to collect Force sensitive children to serve Snoke. Snoke of Ren is ruler of a part of the galaxy that willingly allied with the Empire, and after the Emperor's death welcomed the imperial remnant. It's not strong enough on its own to conquer the New Republic. After the temple was attacked, Luke vanished, Ben was missing, and Leia was only able to get some snippets of info from a damaged R2-D2.

Now more people are becoming Force sensitive, Leia senses it, and she hopes to find her brother to help. Meanwhile the First Order has just taken over as the official government of a few New Republic worlds, using propaganda and lies to turn the population hostile to the central Republic government.

The plot is very similar to TFA. Key thing is that Poe overhears Lor San Tekka accuse Kylo Ren of betraying his master and his fellow students, and then sees Kylo with a light saber, so when Poe meets up with Leia later, that info makes her and Han realize that Kylo is probably their son.

(Phasma, by the way, will be one of the Knights of Ren - Force sensitive, though she doesn't use a lightsaber. In fact, I'd like her to be Snoke's favorite, with Kylo lower-ranked.)

Han takes Finn and Chewie to rescue Rey and try to retrieve Ben. Leia rallies some New Republic fleet, with Poe as just one of the pilots, to go attack a First Order base (not a doomsday weapon, just a planet). Instead of the place blowing up, the duel between Rey and Kylo ends when she beats him, but resists the urge to kill him, then runs off to save an injured Finn.

We end much the same. Leia stays to lead the New Republic and prepare it to stand against the First Order. Rey heads off to find Luke.

The Last Jedi
Rey persuades Ben to redeem himself, and Luke to return to the fight.

Why Luke Has Been Gone So Long. Over the course of the movie we learn that Luke and his wife Mara Jade were training new Jedi when the Knights of Ren attacked and abducted Ben. They killed Mara, and in desperation Luke took her to Ahch-To, which was an ancient nexus of both the Light Side and the Dark. In denial of her death, he sought to call upon the Dark Side to resurrect her. He was moments from doing it when the Force ghost of his father appeared to him and pleaded for him to resist the power of the Dark Side, because even once restored, she would need to be kept alive by more rage and death. Luke ends up screaming and abandoning the ritual, releasing the Dark Side energy he'd called upon in a burst of telekinesis and lightning that obliterates his X-Wing and strands him there. Moreover, it strips him of his connection to the Force entirely. He has no powers.

Surprise Attack on Leia. The start of the movie has Leia arriving at a New Republic military base, planning to give a speech for morale. Finn is Leia's body man, the two of them clearly having bonded over the past few weeks over Han. Poe is getting a promotion and command of a squadron. Then the First Order suddenly attacks. (To be clear, there isn't a ragtag Resistance; this is just a small detachment of the overall New Republic military.) The whole place evacuates, Poe goes to fend off the attack, along with a bunch of ships, and the opening attack goes very similar, including the death of Paige Tico (Rose's sister).

The good guys load up, and after they blow up the Dreadnought, they try to flee by jumping to light speed. But Leia's ship ends up going in a completely different course. They realize their ship's navigation system has been sliced, and when they drop out of hyperspace, they're caught in an interdiction field created by First Order ships, so they can't jump again to light speed. They flee at sublight speeds, and Kylo leads a fighter attack, but hesitates at the last second, and Poe drives him off. Leia's ship manages to slip into a lightning-filled nebula to avoid detection, but they can't activate the ship's hyperdrive. They call for help, but it's unclear whether the signal got out. There might not be anyone who can rescue them.

Rey and Luke. Cut to Rey, finding Luke. Insert a line that she's been flying all across Ahch-To for weeks, trying to hail him, and it was only by chance that they spotted the wreck of his X-Wing. She assumes he crashed, but says he can come with her now. He refuses, and she stays around to try to persuade him and get the truth out of him. She starts having glimpses of Kylo Ren, and we intercut Rey's 'three lessons' on Ahch-To with Leia trying to find a way to survive.

Overcoming the Interdiction. They do have a shuttle that could manage to slip through the interdiction and fly for help. Leia's main ship will go in one direction to lure off the First Order fleet. She sends Finn, Poe, and Rose to Canto Bight, a planet that engineers the specs of First Order ships, so they might be able to find a way to bypass the interdiction. (The First Order star destroyers have powerful long range weapons, so their defense is to use interdiction to force any enemy vessels to drop out of hyperspace far enough away that they'll be obliterated before they can approach. Finn, Poe, and Rose will need to take out the interdiction field so New Republic allies can get in and save the day.)

Over the course of the movie we discover that Rose is actually a First Order sympathizer and spy for them, and she revealed that Leia would be here and gave the First Order a remote connection to the ship's hyperdrive. But she didn't realize her sister would die in the attack, and now she's having second thoughts. On Canto Bight she's clearly scornful of the excesses of the rich, which she blames on the Republic; but then she sees that the First Order abducts some of the children there, and she has a crisis of conscience about the complexity of the conflict.

Phasma tracks the trio to Canto Bight and captures Finn and Poe. Rose reveals she was a spy all along.

Kylo, Rey, and Luke. Snoke has linked Kylo to Rey to try to locate where Luke Skywalker is, because he wants to use him for nefarious purposes.

Kylo and Rey slowly grow closer during the movie, and the whole time we think Kylo is trying to recruit Rey to the Dark Side. She gets the message from Leia's ship that they're trapped, and the warning that anyone who tries to approach would be shot down before they could get close enough to attack. Rey tries to use this to motivate Luke to act, but he is convinced if they go, they'll all die, and he refuses. Rey gets enraged at him, accusing him of abandoning those he cares about the way her parents abandoned her, which is when Luke shares the full story about Mara's death. He's broken, and feels he doesn't have anything to live for.

Rey leaves anyway, and goes to distract Snoke, thinking perhaps that can help her friends escape.

Tied on a String. As Rey goes to Snoke (whose guards are Knights of Ren), Finn and Poe are brought back to Snoke's ship to be executed (mostly Finn, because he's a deserter). Finn gets a brief speech entreating the storm troopers not to be loyal to the First Order. During this, though, Rose slips away and sends a transmission to Leia's ship.

She managed to get schematics for Snoke's flagship, and using the same connection she set up earlier on Leia's hyperdrive, now Leia can control Snoke's hyperdrive. And his hyperdrive is slaved to the rest of the fleet.

Snoke gives his villainous monologue, which can include him taunting Rey for being a nothing child whose parents abandoned her. But he says he has plucked the location of Luke Skywalker from Rey's mind, and when they capture him, they shall offer him and Rey and a hundred other Force sensitive children as a sacrifice to restore to life his master: Darth Sidious.

Things play out similar to in the movie. The execution is about to happen, Leia plugs in coordinates, Snoke taunts Kylo to 'kill his enemy,' and just then Leia triggers the hyperdrive on all the First Order ships: aimed into the lightning-filled nebula. They fly for only a moment, before the impact with the nebula causes terrible damage. In the moment Snoke is distracted, Kylo betrays and kills him, and then Rey and Kylo fight off the guards.

The explosions also interrupt the execution, and Finn and Poe flee, aided by a rebellion in the ranks of the storm troopers. Phasma and Finn battle, and she's got the upper hand, but then the New Republic fleet arrives. While Phasma is momentarily distracted, Finn uses the Force somehow to escape, and so Phasma orders a retreat.

Up in the throne room, the battle is over, and Kylo asks her to join him. She thinks he wants to be just as evil as Snoke, but he explains that no, he has been working from within this whole time to earn the trust of Snoke, to find where Sidious is. He says that if Rey is with him, he might be able to wrest control of the Knights of Ren, and destroy the First Order from within. Rey says that she understands now why he killed Han, but she can see it's torn him apart. She begs him to come back to the light.

And he does. We redeem Kylo Ren in part 2 of the trilogy. Leia and her son reunite, and Rose's betrayal is forgiven. Finn introduces Poe to Rey, and is super stoked that he can use the Force.

Then Leia, Rey, and Ben returning to Luke on Ahch-To, and him being offered a chance of redemption too. He still doesn't have his Force powers, but he can help those who do to be free from the Dark Side.

We can get a montage around the galaxy of good stuff being tempered by bad news. Some storm troopers rebel and flee, but see a city being razed. Leia returns to Coruscant to cheers, but then oversees a commemoration of those lost so far. The First Order occupies Canto Bight but a slave kid demonstrates he can use the Force.

Our final scene, though, is Phasma and other Knights of Ren arriving on Exogol, and bowing to the crackling red Force ghost of Darth Sidious.

The Rise of Skywalker
The Force ghost of Darth Sidious directs the First Order to use the newly-completed Starkiller to annihilate the New Republic, and use the horrific death toll to resurrect himself.

I don't have a whole plot ready, because TRoS as-is kinda sucks, so we'd be remaking it whole cloth. But I'd be excited to have a team of Finn, Poe, Rey, and Ben all being heroes together. (Rose can be about as prominent as Lando was in RotJ.)

Maybe differentiate our three Force users. Rey and Ben are able to do long-distance communication and eventually teleporting stuff between them, plus the typical Jedi powers. Rey can understand machines and fix them with the Force, and is mobile. Ben can do violent stuff really well, including block blasters. Finn is less trained but can hide with the Force and learns to heal.

We'd have enough of a time skip to establish that Luke becomes like a father figure to Rey. We can keep the whole 'call upon the spirits of the dead to defeat Sidious' thing, but have their manifestation triggered by a sacrifice of Luke. He should be involved in the confrontation with Sidious, and he lets himself be struck down, like Obi-Wan.

And then he becomes more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

After having lost his connection to the Force, he returns to it, and causes the Force ghosts of every Jedi we've ever known to empower our new generation of heroes. They destroy Sidious and shatter the Sith temple, destroy the Starkiller, and save the day.

Rey doesn't adopt the Skywalker name, because this is the end of that saga. In fact, let us end on an ending scroll, saying that there were centuries of peace, and balance in the Force. This guarantees no more movies with these characters.

(I also kinda want Phasma to be Lando's daughter, kidnapped by the First Order. But okay, that's rambling.)
 
Last edited:

Celebrim

Legend
If I were going to do a major rewrite of the trilogy...

If you are going to do a sequel to any completed story arc, then it has to address some unresolved conflict from the original story. That is to say, the story has to be about something. One problem that a lot of Star Wars fan fiction has faced is that typically, no one seems really sure what that new conflict should be, so they tend to just keep repeating the beats and conflicts of the original trilogy.

Unsurprisingly, this doesn't inspire quite like the original trilogy. At best, what you end up with is the post Endor extended universe, which was basically just a big Soap Opera unfolding in the foreground of a bunch of variants of the original story line. The really interesting stuff tended to be done in the past of the Republic, because it actually invested itself in unresolved conflicts.

I think your plot outline sounds better than what Disney did do, but then I think 90% of fan fiction is better than what Disney did as well, including the very middling Extended Universe with Luke, Mara Jade, and all the rest.

There are several unresolved conflicts from the original movies, but I think the most interesting one to explore is whether the Jedi are actually good. The original trilogy hinted at this conflict weakly in two ways, first in the fact that the Jedi relied in deceit in their relationship with Luke. Neither Obi Wan nor Yoda was ever honest with him. And further, both Obi Wan and Yoda saw Luke primarily as a tool or a weapon, and councilled him to basically revolve all the problems of the story with a combination of indifference and violence - a path Luke continually rejects, and in both cases was unequivocally right to do so.

In the single most interesting scene of The Last Jedi, and maybe the whole of the wasted trilogy, Luke openly questions the goodness of the Jedi and the need to continue their legacy. But instead of exploring that, Disney cops out and has Yoda defeat Luke in a battle of wits, deceive Luke once again, and ultimately prompt Luke to commit suicide. And it manages to do all of that, without even once suggesting it's self-aware of exactly what it has done or what it means, something that from all indication is born out by the silence of RoS on this subject.

This issue, combined with Luke's willingness to place a great deal of trust in people and see good in them, provides a much more believable and interesting basis for why everything went wrong and why, than the rather lame one in the sequel trilogy.
 

ccs

41st lv DM
*I've now seen Skywalker on NY Eve. Friends insisted I come with them. They bought my tkt, I paid for the popcorn. None of my $ went towards rewarding Disney for this poo.


I'm sorry, but this trilogy is so far gone that with only minor editorial powers - adding/deleting a few scenes, altering a bit of dialog, changing a special effect & such - I couldn't much improve it.

1st up: I'd work out better sub-titles for all three.
2nd: I'd write up better opening crawls. These three sucked.

TFA: If I could manage it? Kylo Ren would never remove his helmet.
Maybe, maybe, I'd consider having him unmasked when he & Han confront one another - and that's only if I couldn't get rid of Kylo being Han & Leia's son.
The destructive beam from the Star Killer base would not be visible planetside unless you were the target or an immediate neighbor. I'd still show the audience this, but it'd be on a giant radar like tracking screen.
Other than this? Without major change power I don't know how to make TFA not be a knockoff of SW: A New Hope.

TLJ: The one change that I would definitely make?
When Leia gets blown into space in TLJ? That'd be the end of her. Yes, it'd cause me to re-do a # of scenes that come after that. I'd get rid of them if possible or cgi an alien resistance member in her place & delete/rerecord her dialog for stuff I wanted to keep.
But I wouldn't have to get tricky with extra bits of footage & scraps of dialog two years later.

TRoS: Well, as I got rid of Leia in TLJ, obviously I'd need to alter scenes she's in. And she won't be around to "save" Kylo.
There would be no dumb ass Sith dagger with a fold out DS fragment shaped clue.
There would be no cavalry charge across the deck of a Star Destroyer. This scene would have to be re-done with resistance commandos in appropriate gear for the near space environment they're in.
Rey would NOT be revealed to be related to Palpatine. Or Luke.



Now if I could go back further & make a few slight edits? To Episodes I - VI?
TPM
1) The planet Anikin is discovered on would not be Tatooine. I'd spend alot of time & $ CGIing over the desert bits/altering the architecture & redubbing a different name wherever it's spoken (or appears on a screen).
2) I would CGI in an older teen in place of kid anikin & re-dub his lines.
3) The word midichlorian would never be uttered.
TRotS
1) Vader would not scream "Nooo!" upon being rebuilt at the end. In fact, him lying nearly complete would be the final shot.
2) Padme would still die in childbirth. You'd either never hear what the names of her children are, or at most you'd hear Lukes name.
A New Hope
*Han shoots Greedo 1st.
ESB
I'd add info in some way, even if only as text across the bottom of the screen, to clearly show you that considerable time passes between fleeing Hoth & reaching Bespin. So that it doesn't appear that Luke became like 70% trained in a mere couple of days/weeks.
RoTJ
I would edit out revealing Leia as being Lukes sister. Luke would still learn he has a sister though, just not who it is.
Vader would NOT be redeemed & appear as Anikins force ghost at the party.
The end conversation between Luke, Han & Leia would reveal that Luke won't be in their way because he's setting out to search for his sister. Hmm, sounds like the hook for more SW stories to me
 

If you are going to do a sequel to any completed story arc, then it has to address some unresolved conflict from the original story. That is to say, the story has to be about something. One problem that a lot of Star Wars fan fiction has faced is that typically, no one seems really sure what that new conflict should be, so they tend to just keep repeating the beats and conflicts of the original trilogy.

That is the problem with Star Wars as a property. It has a pretty small universe and there's not much you can do with it. Stray too much from Stormtroopers, Tie Fighters, X-wings, Jedi, and it no longer resembles the Star Wars that people know and love. So you either end up recycling old beats (The Force Awakens), or trying to regurgitate things that were briefly mentioned in throw away lines from the original trilogy (Solo, and all the prequels), or just make it one giant fan service movie (Rogue One). But there is nothing original and/or new.
 

Remove ads

Top