Late to the conversation.
Read the thread after posting bout Doctor Who. And caught this post. Rattled in my head for a bit and I can't resist replying...
Reveal Rey's link to the force and to Luke's lightsaber. Have a point to her entering the dark hole, leading to either a wise lesson about the Force, or some dark revelation about herself.
That was just more Abrams mysteriousness for the sake of mysteriousness. Like 90% of
Lost the mystery is far more interesting than the answer. If you go with the reasonable answer, this falls flat as it doesn't live up to the hype. Or you build things up to make the answer feel appropriately dramatic, and artificially construct a convoluted answer that just adds complexity for the sake of complexity. And also has the possibility of more plot holes.
I.e. why did the lightsaber call to her?
It was the Living Force moving her in the direction she needed to go. Or because she was there when it was destroyed, which connected her to it beyond time. Or it just called to the first person with enough Force power, and that happened to be her. All of which are solid and valid reasons that would work just fine, but aren't satisfying enough for a mystery that has been on the minds of some fans for two years.
Really, it called to her because she needed to find it, and they never thought of a better way to work it into the plot.
Remove the entire fake out with Holdo. Let the rebels be up front about their plan to escape to the planet Crait,
Poe wasn't up front with his boss. So why did his boss need to be up front with him?
Really, why would a general and leader of the entire Resistance need to justify herself to a punk pilot without a plane who had already been demoted. Poe comes up to someone he knows is an experienced general with more battles under her belt than him and mansplains the situation to her. Really, Poe's lucky she didn't dump him in the detention block for the rest of the trip...
so that Poe and Finn don't not mount some unnecessary suicide plan that ultimately doesn't go anywhere. Let the First Order be aware that they are fleeing to Crait, and be confident that they can crush them on that planet. There's really no way for them to escape from it, so the place is a death trap.
The HUGE problem with that change is it means the First Order is aware they're fleeing to Crait. This means that Holdo's plan is inherently flawed and suicide. (Why is it okay her plan won't work but Finn & Poe's plan failing has to be removed from the movie?) Instead of one sideplot, it makes the entire movie pointless.
See, I love the Poe/ Finn plan failing. How many times have we seen a million-to-one suicide mission succeed in
Star Wars? They're going on their mission and you just expect it will succeed. You don't even question. Even if they get captured it will just be a set-back before they save the Resistance fleet. And the codebreaker with them who seems out for the money will of course have a heart of gold and come back for them when things seem dire.
The Last Jedi was all about flipping tropes. It was a movie about subverting expectations and pulling the rug out from people just when they're comfortable.
Finn and Poe's plan doesn't just fail... it makes things worse. The slicer doesn't have a heart of gold: he's exactly what he appears to be. So he sells out the Resistance. Finn and Poe's plan gets people killed. It almost destroys the entire Resistance. That's the point.
Well... that and it gets Rose and Finn onto the planet to introduce the kids we'll see later. So it's not just nameless kids we don't care about talking about how Luke Skywalker appeared in front of a legion of Stormtroopers and AT-ATs and avoided blaster fire. How he saved the Resistance single-handedly before teleporting away. We see how
Holdo still crashes her ship into the First Order, but she does it as soon as possible, so the rest can escape to the planet. This way she doesn't look incompetent.
That was an editing thing. Movie time doesn't pass the same as real time. It feels longer because there's shots between her deciding and acting. Things are going on simultaneously, but seem sequential because that's how they're shown.
If you just watch her scenes and the related shots, it doesn't feel as long.
Plus, y'know. Drama and suspense.
Leia should have died in outer space. I have no issue with her using her Force powers to float to safety. But with the recent death of Carrie Fisher, they had an easy out here. Why didn't they take it? Why have the character whose actress died, survive, and the character whose actor is still alive and well, die?
I don't see why Hamill being alive should have any bearing on the survival of Luke anymore than Ford being alive has a bearing on Solo remaining dead.
Why did Leia not stay dead? So she could have the reunion scene with Luke. So her final performance and scenes wouldn't be forgotten. (That and they'd have to digitally remove her from the background shots of the last chunk of the movie...) This was Carrie's final performance. We should be able to see it.
Yes, it's sad we don't get the "ending" for Leia. Oh well. I'm sure there'll be a comic or novel. Maybe they can work her into IX with some deleted scenes.
Instead of having Finn and Rose go to the Casino planet to find some hacker, and then also try and board the Dreadnought unnoticed, have them travel to the Casino planet to activate a distress beacon. It would be easy to set it up in such a way that the First Order is blocking rebel communication, so they can't call for help. Finn and Rose need to get down to the planet to remotely activate a distress beacon that will hopefully get reinforcements to Crait in time. Why over complicate things? The First Order however has a heavy presence on the Casino planet, thus adding extra tension to Finn's adventures on the planet. Throw in a battle with some AT ST walkers while you're at it, and you have everything for an exciting finale.
So... the First Order is blocking communications. Why are Finn and Rose going to a planet to call for help rather than just open space. And activating a distress beacon that tells
everyone where you are when the point is to hide. And they're going to a planet with a heavy First Order presence rather than a Resistance allied one... why?
How is that remotely less complicated?
Rey and Kylo still team up against snoke, but snoke regenerates instantly. Thus his menace is not diminished (plus you can still have him show up in the third movie), and his guards actually have a reason to fight Rey and Kylo.
Why? Just so we can have the menacing Emperor figure in the series again?
Snoke was never really interesting. Neither was Sidious really. Both were just bland evil for the sake of evil. Snoke was only fascinating because he was mysterious. He was an unknown. But reveal who he was and then that mystique goes away. We have two trilogies based around the master puppeteer evil Force user who sits in a chair and schemes. This one is going in a different direction. This means Snoke isn't the focus: he's the MacGuffin. The hand the magician is waving to distract you from the sleight of hand.
Rather than Kylo immediately turning back to the dark side again, have them both become renegade Jedi.
Kylo Ren never turned away in the first place. He just killed his master like all Dark Side users tend to do.
Snoke then sends in the Knights of Ren to kill them, which leaves both Rey and Kylo critically injured, until they are rescued by Luke with his astral projection thingy. Luke then fights the Knights of Ren, giving Rey and Kylo a chance to escape. Although Luke tells Rey to leave Kylo behind, she refuses, and the two escape together on the Falcon, before Luke's clever trick is revealed. Luke then does NOT die after the astral projection, so he can still show up in the next movie.
Luke doesn't get to save Rey. Luke isn't the hero of the film or this trilogy. Rey is. She saves herself. And then she saves Luke, by pushing him back into the fight, allowing him to redeem himself and find peace.
(And Luke can still show up in the next movie as a force ghost. )
Just like how Obi Wan, the hero of the first trilogy, is quickly killed in Episode IV to make room for the new hero. Like how Yoda can fight in the prequels but is just the adviser in the original trilogy who passes on the Legacy before dying.
A new trilogy was
always going to wreck the original cast. It had to because, to tell the story, they had to have lost after
Return of the Jedi. If they won and everything worked out, there'd be no more stories to tell. So the Empire had to continue and the heroes' victory had to be diminished. The only alternative is a new threat that is unrelated to the old, which feels tacked-on and risks not feeling thematically appropriate, like what they EU did with the Yuuzhan Vong.
(This is probably why Lucas' planned episode VII to IX were smaller and more personal. So the happy ending could be maintained.)
While I would have enjoyed the fanservice of having Luke be the all powerful Jedi Master and striding into battle, the EU showed how boring that is. The perfect Luke that survives and can kick anyone's ass isn't interesting. They're a static character that is hard to write stories for. (Just like how the writers of the
Clone Wars series commented on how they struggled to write Yoda-centric stories.) And the above isn't true to Luke's character who spends all his time screwing up and making the wrong decisions. Luke was always the bad pupil who never did what he was told. Why would he be a better teacher? Similarly, the later EU novels really suffered by having Han, Leia, and Luke be irreplaceable and unkillable, and just ended up repeatedly doing horrible things to the second generation as a result. If Disney hadn't wiped out the EU when it did, the novels were approaching an awkward position of having all the new characters dead or evil while having all the original characters too old to reasonably contribute.
The story needs to move forward.
The Knights of Ren will hunt Rey and Kylo in the next movie, and we can now probably squeeze a cool lightsaber fight with Luke and Rey versus the Knights of Ren into movie 3.
And instead we get Rey alone against Ren
and his knights.
But, really, "squeezing a cool lightsaber fight" into a film isn't a good reason to alter a plot. Cool lightsaber fights are a dime a dozen. There's sooooo many on YouTube. They've been done. The fight against the
Praetorian Guard with their funky weapons added a new spin to the fight that a generic lightsaber battle with the Knights of Ren would lack.
The rebels escape to Crait, where an actual battle with the First Order takes place. Because why have these awesome looking AT-AT's in your movie if you're not going to use them?
Empire Strikes Back established that AT-ATs were basically mobile siege weapons/ troop carriers that weren't good at shooting down small Rebel fighters. Really, in terms of plot, they're there to blast Luke. And sell Lego...
The rebels try and hold back the invasion with their inferior vehicles, but they are getting crushed. That is until Finn manages to call in reinforcements just in time,
Yay! Deus ex machina to the rescue!
Plus, the whole damn point is that the Resistance is on their own. They need to save themselves. There's no help coming. No reinforcements. No Republic. If they want help... they need to inspire the next generation. They have to do more than blow up First Order Stormtroopers.
only to get captured himself together with Rose (which leaves Finn and Rose captured at the start of the next movie).
Why?
So we can keep Finn and Rey apart even more? So they can continue to have this weird relationship despite having known each other for an afternoon and not having a single conversation about themselves...
Neither Finn or Rose take part in the battle on Crait, and Rose does not crash her ship into that of Finn. That was dumb.
Wasn't a fan of that... But it was an important lesson for Finn. He hates the First Order, and this was his opportunity to be a more rounded individual. To be more than someone who hates.
Plus, again, the hero sacrificing themselves to crash into the vulnerable superweapon is a pretty known trope. And
The Last Jedi is all about reversing expectations... That's the
The Last Jedi drinking game: drink every time a trope is subverted or lamp shaded.
thanks to a hidden weapon on the planet that the First Order does not know about (maybe they have one of those hammerhead ships from Rogue One?).
Yay! More deus ex machina!
And a good thing the Rebels never used that giant planetary superweapon in any of the fights they really needed it during the original trilogy...