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.