@Dom
I appreciate your perspective about the “First Order spies” angle, I feel I kept bugging Nev about how that angle was perfect and should use it for his crawl, but I’ve been reading different opinions and have slowly been coming to a similar conclusion as you. And I think Nev said the same thing to me. "If the Republic has already been compromised, is it already a lost cause?” is another point I’ve heard. While it has been compromised in canon, maybe it wouldn’t be best to emphasize that angle.
And like you said, it is a little bit truer to that theme in the new films.
"With the New Republic unwilling to start another war, General Leia Organa mobilizes a private/covert Resistance to counter the rise of this growing Imperial remnant.”
Another reason I like this phrase is that allows you add a little extra info that the First Order is an Imperial Remnant, if the first paragraph is too wordy and felt you need to cut/move a bit of FO information.
So, you have could have a first paragraph like,
"Luke Skywalker has vanished. The mysterious FIRST ORDER has emerged from uncharted space and will not rest until Skywalker, the last Jedi, has been destroyed.” or sort a variation of Nev’s, “In his absence, the mysterious FIRST ORDER has emerged from desolate space with ambitions to restore their fallen Empire.”
Yeah I feel like this is more on the right track.
To TLJ
Intersting perspective. I don’t necessarily hate, but I am surprised how highly you think of it! Also curious what your issues are with the Empire crawl. I aways felt that it should have said “led by Princess Leia” rather than “led by Luke Skywalker” but didn’t really have any problems outside of that.
I’m surprised by how much I like it too. With TFA, I felt like I had issues with the crawl the moment I was first reading it. I’ve seen TLJ many times now, and reread the crawl in isolation - with an eye towards changes - and have mostly struggled to come up with much wrong. Part of this is I think inherent to the movies themselves. TFA is set 30 years after ROTJ, and at least a whole other trilogy worth of plot has happened in between. Whereas TLJ picks up right after TFA, so any plot-based set-up is incredibly minimal, which allows it to really focus in on what matters to the film.
That’s one of my issues with ESB’s crawl, yes. That line makes it seem like we’re preparing for a more basic SF/F sequel, ‘oh our hero saved the day so he is leading all the good guys!’ Besides that, my bigger problem is the final paragraph, which, and I don’t know how to describe this accurately, just sort of leaves you hanging. Doesn’t feel a conclusive way to end the crawl, if that makes sense.
The evil lord Darth Vader, obsessed with finding young Skywalker, has dispatched thousands of remote probes into the far reaches of space…
I’ve been trying to think of a way to rewrite this, but basically I’d rather it ended with “far reaches of space to find young Skywalker…” or something along those lines. Don’t know how to describe my issue here, I’m no grammatist.