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Idea: 'The Sequel Trilogy - complete redux' (an idea and discussion thread)

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 (Edited)

Hello there!

I’m a long time lurker, in love with the fan edits world. I could have continued to silently enjoy the great edits but I had to come out and speak, because “something terrible has happened”: the Sequel Trilogy!
Jokes aside: I see that there are TFA edits already and that the TLJ edit ideas are been discussed. But, IMHO, those two films need so much restructuring, not just some trims. I see great problems at the foundation of the story and I’m not even sure something can be done to save the wrecking ship that this trilogy is.
Anyway, for the sake of discussion, this are the major points a hypothetical edit should take into account:

  1. Any trilogy is its own thing
    The Original Trilogy and the Prequels are really different, both visually and storywise (and yet, at the end of ROTS the two trilogies appears to be wonderfully tied). The sequels are just a copy-paste of the OT: their design are too similar the OT ones and, so much worse, the story it’s almost a rip off of the episodes IV to VI.
    What should be done: totally rethink and rework the movies, even mixing them, to make the best out of the shot and try to tell a new story.

  2. The rebels won the war
    They won. Period. We can’t accept to see that nothing changed. That the OT characters and their efforts lead to NOTHING at all. We can’t be satisfied with just a line in the TFA’s crawl saying that “the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen from the ashes of the Empire” to make us watch the same Empire Vs Rebellion story we already saw. I, personally, find depressing seeing the New Republic been destroyed in ten seconds, compared with the great ad “historically accurate” Palpatine’s rise to power we see in the prequels.
    What should be done: contextualize the First Order as the reorganised Imperial remnant, a second grade power in a galaxy changed since the OT.

  3. A historical setting
    The Galactic Empire is a sort of mashup between the Third Reich and the Roman Empire. Historically both of them (like almost every great political power) saw their old territories fractured after the fall: the end of a strong central power lead to a divided political setting. We should think at the after-ROTJ galaxy as the Europe of the VI century AD, with many little states in place of the Empire. The New Republic could be the biggest power, controlling the core system. The First Order could control a relatively big “piece of the cake” in the outer rim. And then we could have single indipendent planets, systems or sector (Mandalorian Space? Hutt Space? and so on…). The Jedi could have been evolved in a “super partes” organisation, not just tied the Republic but the entire galaxy.
    What should be done: Make Hosnian into Coruscant. Make it been bombed (but not destroyed) by Snoke’s ship as the first act of war. Make Leia be a representative for the Republic in a mission to seek help to other nation against the FO treat. Make Luke the Master of a new generation by imply that there are other Jedi out there or by shooting new scene with new Jedi.

  4. Legacy characters need to be respected
    Han and Leia are back to their OT selves. Luke is a depressed asshole. No way.
    What should be done: make Leia a Republic representative. Give Han some purpose, some background, whatever. Make Luke a believable evolution of his young self: he can be depressed for what happened with Kylo but he can’t be beat. And make is new generation of Jedi a reality. We already seen “the last Jedi in exile” (Ben and Yoda), let’s see something new.

  5. Inconsistencies with the depicting of the Force
    No one can use the Force without training. Nor even Anakin could.
    What should be done: trim, cut, mix the movies so that Rey can’t use the Force until she’s been trained by Luke. And, oh, make Luke actually be on Crait. The whole Jedi projection thing is a never-seen-before-bulls**t.

  6. Snoke
    Really? The character who brought back chaos in the galaxy is just a no one?
    What should be done: give him a background! Is he a former inquisitor? A secret apprentice? Palpatine’s pizza boy? Whatever. He could even be edited out and / or replaced with a new (old) character in order to explain why and how the “Empire” is back.
     

Now back to reality: I think is pointless to do any of this until Episode IX is out. And we even don’t know if the story of the ST’s character will be finished by there or there will be new movies (so other fan edit material) with them. But I see so many problems with these two movies that I had to speak out.
And I also know that some proposal are near to impossibile (shot new scenes? WTF!) But Adywan is doing it so, maybe, just maybe, are not so impossible.

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[Saving this post for when IX is released]

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You’re describing a fan film, not a fan edit. Good luck Mr. Lucas!

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Maybe it’s just a me problem but I lost interest when I saw your username.

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Indeed, he put a “s” at the end of a verb conjugated in plural. Correct sentence is:

at the end of ROTS the two trilogies appear to be wonderfully tied

But I may agree more with the following one:

at the end of ROTS the two trilogies appear to be somehow tied

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If you’re going to nitpick grammar, you shouldn’t say “somehow tied.” I suspect you mean “somewhat tied.” And if we’re going to go that far it really should be “somewhat tied together.”

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 (Edited)

TV’s Frink said:

If you’re going to nitpick grammar, you shouldn’t say “somehow tied.” I suspect you mean “somewhat tied.” And if we’re going to go that far it really should be “somewhat tied together.”

Yes, sorry, I’m not a native speaker.
And yes, the trilogies could have been tied better but after TFA and TLJ came out, the prequels’ problems appear to me as insignificant, compared to the ones of the sequels.

Anyway, this list of things are just my two cents. I know that some ideas are very difficult to realise but still some of them could be of interest to some fan editor. Just not stop reading at my made-up-in-two-seconds nickname. 😛

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ray_afraid said:

For the record, I got no problem with the grammar of that statement, but with the meaning.

TV’s Frink said:

it really should be “somewhat tied together.”

It should be “weakly tied and mostly disconnected.”

I see you point. What I meant was that ROTS ends with the Empire established, Vader “born”, Obi-Wan in hiding, and so on. And we find the same situation at the opening of ANH: Luke and Leia are grown ups, Obi-Wan is older, but the setting is the same, that’s the natural evolution of the situation we saw at the end of ROTS.
And we should have seen something similar between the OT and the ST. Instead we discover that too much has happened between the movies and the situation at the beginning of TFA is the opposite of the one at the end of ROTJ.

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TV’s Frink said:

If you’re going to nitpick grammar, you shouldn’t say “somehow tied.” I suspect you mean “somewhat tied.” And if we’re going to go that far it really should be “somewhat tied together.”

After checking, it seems that both can be used in this context, but thanks anyway: somewhat/somehow are often misused by non-native english speakers such as myself, I’ll be sure to avoid the mistake from now on!

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 (Edited)

Huh, I haven’t checked myself but if “somehow” is an acceptable variant, I stand corrected. It seems to me they mean two different things though.

Saying “tied” without “together” still sounds wrong to me, even if it isn’t wrong.

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For “tied” you’re right: in this context “together” is needed.

(is there a grammar thread ?)

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I actually think it would be possible to have Rey train with Luke before doing any of her stuff, but it would require a huge restructure of both TFA and TLJ

By the way, the more I think about it, the more I think it would make sense if TFA and TLJ were combined into 1 long movie.

There’s no timejump anyway.

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Any trilogy is its own thing
The Original Trilogy and the Prequels are really different, both visually and storywise (and yet, at the end of ROTS the two trilogies appears to be wonderfully tied). The sequels are just a copy-paste of the OT: their design are too similar the OT ones and, so much worse, the story it’s almost a rip off of the episodes IV to VI.
What should be done: totally rethink and rework the movies, even mixing them, to make the best out of the shot and try to tell a new story.

I don’t see much we can do about this, unfortunately. Of course we can remove the egrigious third Death Star, reducing Starkiller Base to just that: a base. Tbf, the Resistance doesn’t reuse any designs except the X-Wing and Mon Cal cruiser (supposedly they have A-wings, but I certainly didn’t see them). I would like to add cacti to Jakku and maybe water to make it more distinct from Tatooine.

The rebels won the war
They won. Period. We can’t accept to see that nothing changed. That the OT characters and their efforts lead to NOTHING at all. We can’t be satisfied with just a line in the TFA’s crawl saying that “the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen from the ashes of the Empire” to make us watch the same Empire Vs Rebellion story we already saw. I, personally, find depressing seeing the New Republic been destroyed in ten seconds, compared with the great ad “historically accurate” Palpatine’s rise to power we see in the prequels.
What should be done: contextualize the First Order as the reorganised Imperial remnant, a second grade power in a galaxy changed since the OT.

I really think it should’ve been a proxy war, either between the Republic and the Empire, or the populist and centrist parties of the Republic. The First Order and the Resistance should be on even ground. No more underdog stuff.

What should be done: Make Hosnian into Coruscant. Make it been bombed (but not destroyed) by Snoke’s ship a dreadnought as the first act of war. Make Leia be a representative for the Republic in a mission to seek help to other nation against the FO treat. Make Luke the Master of a new generation by imply that there are other Jedi out there or by shooting new scene with new Jedi.

FTFY

Legacy characters need to be respected
Han and Leia are back to their OT selves. Luke is a depressed asshole. No way.
What should be done: make Leia a Republic representative. Give Han some purpose, some background, whatever. Make Luke a believable evolution of his young self: he can be depressed for what happened with Kylo but he can’t be beat. And make is new generation of Jedi a reality. We already seen “the last Jedi in exile” (Ben and Yoda), let’s see something new.

I think Leia’s character progression would be fine if we saw it onscreen. She tried to warn the Senate that the First Order was a legitimate threat but they thought that was ludicrous and labelled her as a warmonger, hence having to resort to forming the Resistance. Han’s character can be fixed extremely easily by making him a Resistance general who does smuggling on the side, and was sent to find out what happened to Poe. If you remove the Rathtar scene like so many seem to, you could even make him a fulltime general with no smuggling. I don’t see any problem with what happened to Luke’s character, and while I do agree it sucks to be back to the “last Jedi” status quo, there’s not much we can do about it.

Inconsistencies with the depicting of the Force
No one can use the Force without training. Nor even Anakin could.

Luke had no problem lifting his lightsaber from the snow in ESB. I agree that performing a mind trick is on a whole other level, and thus should be cut, but that’s about it.

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I don’t have such a huge problem with Rey using the Force from the get-go seeing as

  1. This is kind of the whole point of this trilogy so far, and
  2. We don’t have the full picture yet.

I just wish this trilogy provided more exposition. It’s like if right now, people just LOATHE exposition to a point where film-makers just press CTRL-ALT-DEL and remove it all. It’s about finding a balance.

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I have more or less the same feelings as the OP and yeah, there is bearly any explination on whats going on politics wise etc. I had no idea where the First Order came from or why the New Republic and the Resistance weren’t part of the same team. It wasn’t until much later that I found it all out by reading. The New Republic didn’t see the First Order as a threat so started laying down weapons, Leia thought otherwise and created the Resistance etc. It’s a lot for a faneditor to cram into an opening crawl, especially when also having to explain about the map and Luke.

This will be a long post but my thoughts on how to do this was:

TFA - Somehow fit into the crawl who the First Order are and that Luke has gone to the island for the Jedi Temple. Luke is now needed but they don’t know where the temple is. The guy with the map at the start of TFA knows where and gives them the map (full map).

Events carry on as normal but Finn and Poe escape in the Tie, no crash. First Order go for the droid on the planet below as they got it out of him earlier. Next time we see Finn and Poe is when they enter the Resistance base together. Troopers catch Rey with the droid, the run to escape and board the falcon, Falcon vs Ties then Rey asks bb8 where the base is. Finn would have to be masked out of shots and any fire coming from the falcon will have to be removed as, obviously, Finn isn’t there to shoot. Will take a lot of work but Ive quickly looked over it and I think its possible.

Scenes from TLJ tell us that they are tracking the Falcon using the new tech. Rey lands at the Resistance base (can use shots from the planet where Maz’s castle is as the scenery is quite similar as far as I can remember). When the Falcon lands BB8 reunites with Poe and Han and Chewie enter (still a general and part of the Resistence) and discuss the map with Rey on board (whered you get this from? Jakku. I told you we should of searched there Chewie etc) BB8 shows the full map to Leia. Rey goes down the stairs to find Lukes lightsaber and leaves for training. First order appear above (as they were tracking the falcon) and they have to evacuate the base.

TLJ evacuation and escape is intercut with Rey meeting luke and training begins, Resistance lands on Crait. Film ends on Rey swinging her staff at the rocks and cuts on Lukes face.

TLJ - Crawl says that its been a few days since TFA, First Order know that the Resistance are trapped so have spent the time rearming and have brought in the walkers. Rey has been training for the same length of time. When we first see Rey she is now using her lightsaber on the rock to mirror her at the end of the last film.

Ive got tons more ideas and a good bit of TLJ worked out but I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ll be working on my own version at some point in the future (probably after EP9) but your welcome to take any ideas of mine.

Edit: Since reading your post again, the part about snoke - if it isn’t answered in EP9, I may shange the reflection Rey sees of herself to Snoke. In the waterfall shot after, instead of a voiceover from Rey, we hear Palpatine say something like “Darth Plegasis was so powerful, he was able to create life” or whatever he said. This would answer who he is and tie the sequels into the prequels a bit better. Currently, the sequel trilogy feels more like its been forced onto the end of episodes 1-6 and doesn’t quite connect as episode 6 seemed so final.

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Anakin Starkiller said:

Of course we can remove the egrigious third Death Star

Yes. That’s mandatory!

reducing Starkiller Base to just that: a base.

Yes. Or maybe, just maybe, the FO capital planet?

I would like to add cacti to Jakku and maybe water to make it more distinct from Tatooine.

That would be great! Or, maybe, just changing the sand and/or sky colour could be enough to make Jakku different.

Han’s character can be fixed extremely easily by making him a Resistance general who does smuggling on the side, and was sent to find out what happened to Poe. If you remove the Rathtar scene like so many seem to, you could even make him a fulltime general with no smuggling.

How do you make him search for Poe? I don’t recall him even speak about or interact with him.

I don’t see any problem with what happened to Luke’s character, and while I do agree it sucks to be back to the “last Jedi” status quo, there’s not much we can do about it.

Well… I’m wondering if it’s possible to move the Luke Vs. Kylo duel at the end of VII, making Luke to be actually there. And then having the Rey training in VIII, as it is but before she make any use of the Force. Of course this isn’t easy…

Luke had no problem lifting his lightsaber from the snow in ESB. I agree that performing a mind trick is on a whole other level, and thus should be cut, but that’s about it.

Luke already had some sort of training with Ben a the beginning of TESB. Before meeting Ben he wasn’t able to do any of the Force related stuff. So should be Rey before meeting Luke.

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DougieP said:

I have more or less the same feelings as the OP and yeah, there is bearly any explination on whats going on politics wise etc. I had no idea where the First Order came from or why the New Republic and the Resistance weren’t part of the same team. It wasn’t until much later that I found it all out by reading. The New Republic didn’t see the First Order as a threat so started laying down weapons, Leia thought otherwise and created the Resistance etc. It’s a lot for a faneditor to cram into an opening crawl, especially when also having to explain about the map and Luke.

Yes. This is why I’d like to make the Resistance just the New Republic. Simple and logic, after the ending of ROTJ.

This will be a long post but my thoughts on how to do this was:

TFA - Somehow fit into the crawl who the First Order are and that Luke has gone to the island for the Jedi Temple. Luke is now needed but they don’t know where the temple is. The guy with the map at the start of TFA knows where and gives them the map (full map).

Events carry on as normal but Finn and Poe escape in the Tie, no crash. First Order go for the droid on the planet below as they got it out of him earlier. Next time we see Finn and Poe is when they enter the Resistance base together. Troopers catch Rey with the droid, the run to escape and board the falcon, Falcon vs Ties then Rey asks bb8 where the base is. Finn would have to be masked out of shots and any fire coming from the falcon will have to be removed as, obviously, Finn isn’t there to shoot. Will take a lot of work but Ive quickly looked over it and I think its possible.

Scenes from TLJ tell us that they are tracking the Falcon using the new tech. Rey lands at the Resistance base (can use shots from the planet where Maz’s castle is as the scenery is quite similar as far as I can remember). When the Falcon lands BB8 reunites with Poe and Han and Chewie enter (still a general and part of the Resistence) and discuss the map with Rey on board (whered you get this from? Jakku. I told you we should of searched there Chewie etc) BB8 shows the full map to Leia. Rey goes down the stairs to find Lukes lightsaber and leaves for training. First order appear above (as they were tracking the falcon) and they have to evacuate the base.

TLJ evacuation and escape is intercut with Rey meeting luke and training begins, Resistance lands on Crait. Film ends on Rey swinging her staff at the rocks and cuts on Lukes face.

TLJ - Crawl says that its been a few days since TFA, First Order know that the Resistance are trapped so have spent the time rearming and have brought in the walkers. Rey has been training for the same length of time. When we first see Rey she is now using her lightsaber on the rock to mirror her at the end of the last film.

Ive got tons more ideas and a good bit of TLJ worked out but I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ll be working on my own version at some point in the future (probably after EP9) but your welcome to take any ideas of mine.

Edit: Since reading your post again, the part about snoke - if it isn’t answered in EP9, I may shange the reflection Rey sees of herself to Snoke. In the waterfall shot after, instead of a voiceover from Rey, we hear Palpatine say something like “Darth Plegasis was so powerful, he was able to create life” or whatever he said. This would answer who he is and tie the sequels into the prequels a bit better. Currently, the sequel trilogy feels more like its been forced onto the end of episodes 1-6 and doesn’t quite connect as episode 6 seemed so final.

WOOOOO! So many great ideas! Apart from not having Rey and Finn together in TFA (I really like how they interact), this is working very well! And the “Snoke is Plagueis” thing could be good if IX fails to give us some explanation about him.

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Jake Skywalker said:
What I meant was that ROTS ends with the Empire established, Vader “born”, Obi-Wan in hiding, and so on. And we find the same situation at the opening of ANH: Luke and Leia are grown ups, Obi-Wan is older, but the setting is the same, that’s the natural evolution of the situation we saw at the end of ROTS.
And we should have seen something similar between the OT and the ST. Instead we discover that too much has happened between the movies and the situation at the beginning of TFA is the opposite of the one at the end of ROTJ.

I understood your point and completely agree! There’s a natural progression, plotwise - despite the interior problems of the prequels - from Episode III to EpIV. But from EpVI to VII, there isn’t.

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Jake Skywalker said:

Apart from not having Rey and Finn together in TFA (I really like how they interact)

Yeah, I totally get that and I did think of that while thinking of this. The idea was to reduce the number of coincidences and the fact that Poe is so eager to take Finn back to Jakku but then just goes back to base after crashing.

Coincidences in original cut - Map and Rey are on the same planet, BB8 runs into Rey, Rey and BB8 run into Finn, the 3 run into Han, Rey Finds the lightsaber at Mazs castle where Han takes them (maybe more?).

In this version - Map and Rey are on the same planet, BB8 runs into Rey.

Far less in this version. I guess running into Finn would just be one more but then Poe just leaves without BB8. I dunno.

Not sure how you would turn the Resistence into the New Republic aside from the crawl. There must be a lot of important dialogue with “The Resistance” in it and almost no one says New Republic so there isn’t any chance of dubbing over.

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DougieP said:

Yeah, I totally get that and I did think of that while thinking of this. The idea was to reduce the number of coincidences and the fact that Poe is so eager to take Finn back to Jakku but then just goes back to base after crashing.

Coincidences in original cut - Map and Rey are on the same planet, BB8 runs into Rey, Rey and BB8 run into Finn, the 3 run into Han, Rey Finds the lightsaber at Mazs castle where Han takes them (maybe more?).

In this version - Map and Rey are on the same planet, BB8 runs into Rey.

Far less in this version. I guess running into Finn would just be one more but then Poe just leaves without BB8. I dunno.

I see your point. As Pixar’s Emma Coats says “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” But, given the material we have, we’d end up with Rey and Finn as strangers… I don’t know about that…

Not sure how you would turn the Resistence into the New Republic aside from the crawl. There must be a lot of important dialogue with “The Resistance” in it and almost no one says New Republic so there isn’t any chance of dubbing over.

I’d try (but I don’t know if it’s possible) to trim the dialogue to avoid any mention of the Resistance, while establishing the New Republic in the crawl. This is a possible TFA crawl that:

  • justifies Luke’s journey as needed in is path as a Jedi Master (and avoid to make him just run away);
  • establish the New Republic and Leia’s role in it;
  • as you say, make Poe retrieving the whole map from Lor San Tekka (another problem: who is him? just another random character thrown in by JJ… 😕 ).

Anyway, here’s the crawl:

Luke Skywalker has vanished! The Jedi Master left in order to find the SACRED JEDI TEXTS, the ancient books containing the knowledge and the wisdom needed to rebuild the Order.

Luke doesn’t know that, in his absence, the sinister FIRST ORDER is born from the ashes of the Empire, menacing the fragile NEW REPUBLIC, for which Princess Leia Organa is tirelessly traveling as ambassador from system to system, hoping to annex as many planets as possible.

Desperate to find her brother Luke, Leia has sent the most daring pilot of the Republic on a secret mission to Jakku, where an old ally has discovered a map to the possible Luke’s whereabouts…

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Jake Skywalker said:

I see your point. As Pixar’s Emma Coats says “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” But, given the material we have, we’d end up with Rey and Finn as strangers… I don’t know about that…

Your probably right. As much as the sequels arn’t for me, I actually like Finn but that might be just due to John’s likeability. He’s a cool guy lol. I actually felt bad when he was going to sacrifice himself. So, yeah it would be good to keep them together as to establish character etc. Hopefully find some lines from Poe that can be mashed together to give some sort of explanation to Finn when they meet up again so that he didn’t leave for no reason.

I’d try (but I don’t know if it’s possible) to trim the dialogue to avoid any mention of the Resistance, while establishing the New Republic in the crawl. This is a possible TFA crawl that:

  • justifies Luke’s journey as needed in is path as a Jedi Master (and avoid to make him just run away);
  • establish the New Republic and Leia’s role in it;
  • as you say, make Poe retrieving the whole map from Lor San Tekka (another problem: who is him? just another random character thrown in by JJ… 😕 ).

Anyway, here’s the crawl:

Luke Skywalker has vanished! The Jedi Master left in order to find the SACRED JEDI TEXTS, the ancient books containing the knowledge and the wisdom needed to rebuild the Order.

Luke doesn’t know that, in his absence, the sinister FIRST ORDER is born from the ashes of the Empire, menacing the fragile NEW REPUBLIC, for which Princess Leia Organa is tirelessly traveling as ambassador from system to system, hoping to annex as many planets as possible.

Desperate to find her brother Luke, Leia has sent the most daring pilot of the Republic on a secret mission to Jakku, where an old ally has discovered a map to the possible Luke’s whereabouts…

Not a bad crawl, I might actually use this as a template and tweak it a bit for my own edit, If you don’t mind lol. Lor San Tekka is another thing but I don’t think that he is a big enough issue to worry about. Only possible way I can think of fixing him is just adding it to the crawl but he barely has any screen time so it might come off as strange. Plus, by changing it from him having a map to Luke (as stated in the crawl) to a map to the Jedi temple. It makes the issue even less important. They know Lukes gone to the temple, just don’t know where it is themselves, but Tekka does. Of course, this might bring up the point of why wouldn’t he just tell them through hologram or whatever. I’m assuming that they must of contacted him previously to meeting him.

I think the biggest problem would be with a continuity issue due to Kylo Ren with his helmet off/on and scarred face/no scar. Mainly since the whole trilogy would be completely rearranged.

Also, as you said previously, I would also prefer Luke to go in person. Would be easy enough to do. Need to keep in mind that his lightsaber would have to be recolored and handle replaced with his green one. Would love an actual clash of blades too but no idea how to properly pull that off. Maybe I’m just dreaming but I’m gonna try anyway.