Here’s the problem with the crawl, you have to start out with the threat. You can’t have two paragraphs of “good guys are winning,” that’s not terribly exciting or urgent enough.
I wonder, though, if this particular movie might do well with exactly that. Imply that people seem pretty hopeful and all that, then your opening sequence establishes that “the First Order was just the beginning” and “witness the power of my forty-seven THOUSAND star destroyers!”
In my crawl draft, I thought about adding the word ‘disparate’ regarding the worlds of people who have risen up. There are more of them than each may realize and they haven’t coalesced. The FO has them believing they’re alone. But when I read it back it sounded weird.
“The populace of countless [disparate] worlds have risen in defiance of the diabolical First Order.”
Well I do think you’re on to something, one of the few clear themes that comes through in this movie is uniting and working together, so it’d be wise to set that up.
I get what you’re saying about making it seem like the good guys are winning, but I think it doesn’t really track with what we see of the Resistance in the film, they’re clearly struggling even before Palpatine is on the scene.
That in mind, this is my new crawl mockup
The galaxy is divided. All over, people raise arms in the fight for freedom, and are quickly quelled by the tyrannical FIRST ORDER.
But the spark of hope burns bright, under the leadership of GENERAL LEIA ORGANA, who dispatches her agents to unite these disparate worlds in the name of RESISTANCE.
Meanwhile, SUPREME LEADER KYLO REN searches for the source of his former master’s dark power, anxious to end the cycle of war once and for all. . . .
I’ve ditched Rey completely as it’s a distraction that doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. I didn’t mention Luke because it’d feel weird to me to mention a character in the crawl who isn’t really in the movie, plus I think the “spark” should invoke him well enough. I’m also hoping to make it seem like rounding up the people of the galaxy is something that’s been in the works for awhile and doesn’t just occur cause they all lost bets to Lando. And finally, I’m trying to retain some continuity with Kylo’s goals from TLJ by reframing them a bit.