NeverarGreat said:
What if the beginning of this movie was excised entirely?
Begin the film with an opening crawl informing us that the First Order has found the Resistance and chased them across the galaxy, Ren has completed his training with Snoke, and Snoke wants Leia alive in order to find the Last Jedi. Then go to the scene of Rey on the island and imply through those scenes that it is some time before we meet the rest of our heroes again.
You could cut out the Resistance escape and Poe’s hothead moves, Rose’s sister’s sacrifice, Snoke’s first scene with Ren, Finn waking up, Rose meeting Finn, all that. The first scene of the Resistance could be on Canto Bight. It would be assumed that Finn is on some secret mission with another member of the Resistance, and I think they even explain their mission while there (which was unnecessary in the film originally, but would make more sense here). We can assume that Finn and Rose have had a longer-term relationship than what we’ve seen, which might help with the awkward kiss at the end. And we already know that Poe is a hothead, so his first scene is somewhat superfluous anyway.
Is there anything that we simply can’t lose from the beginning of the Resistance plot? I have still only seen this once, so my memory is fuzzy.
I mean, if I had my way the whole movie would have been about Rey, Kylo, and Luke.
They should have just made Rose both the hacker and the engineer. She gets Finn on board the Supremacy and instead of sneaking around the casino they sneak around the ship. The ship was cool, why not spend more time there? No need for a BDT character, and leave BB-8 out of the whole thing.
Canto Bight, Maz Kanata, the excessive BB-8 (in both TFA and TLJ, in the OT nobody actually cared all that much about droids)…they’re all so…Disney. If Disney wanted these films to be regarded as appealing solely for their quality and not just for their ability to tick all of the Disney max-market boxes they could have been truly special. It’s starting to kill me that they’ve gone in the direction they’ve gone in, because, imo, Rey and Kylo as interesting and great of characters as any in the OT.