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Star Wars Episode IX (was) to be directed by Colin Trevorrow - DUEL OF THE FATES RIP — Page 9

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I think it’s apparent that Disney has tried to distance themselves form the Prequels as far as the ST is concerned, the second draft of Trevarrow’s script specifically swaps out coruscant as the FO capital for another metropolitan planet with the same aesthetic, likely indicating a mandate.

Peace is a lie
There is only passion…

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But where are you getting the idea that Disney is making Lucasfilm stay away from prequel era storytelling in the sequel trilogy?

If you’re going to be infuriated by their (whose? Disney’s? Lucasfilms? Trevorrows? Abrams?) shortsightedness it helps to actually know whether or not they’re having the vision problems you’re diagnosing in the first place.

There doesn’t have to be a conspiracy in place for questionable decisionmaking to appear. That can happen completely independently, and often does. I understand that it can be more comforting to imagine an effort to screw things up leading to things we don’t like showing up in a movie, but the uncomfortable truth is that a lot of the stuff that goes wrong is often just… unforced errors.

And considering most of the time we don’t actually know what’s going on behind closed doors focusing SO much time and energy on outright GUESSING why a decision was made and getting mad about that guess as if it was fact seems like wasted energy, especially since ultimately it doesnt’ change the fact of what we did get, and why it doesn’t work ON IT’S OWN.

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idir_hh said:

Removing Coruscant and Mortis seems to have been a mandate by Disney, they probably thought the Prequel imagery would upset the “hardcore fans” which is most likely also why they canned George Lucas’ scrips. Its infuriating how short sighted they were.

This doesn’t really make sense.

First of all, Mortis isn’t from the prequels, it’s from TCW. Since the Disney acquisition, they’ve had no problem using TCW stuff in other projects (not to mention TCW literally coming back later this month). Which is to say nothing of the fact that, while Mortis is gone in the final DOTF draft, Moraband has been added. Ultimately the real reason they changed it is because Rey has a different reason for going there (to find a spire that can transmit a message).

As for Coruscant becoming Remnicore, there’s plenty of explanations possible without resorting to conspiracy theories. In my mind, if the planet still looked like Coruscant, then it’s PT iconography regardless of what it’s called. If Disney had a problem with PT iconography to that extent they wouldn’t have just asked to change the name of the planet, they would have asked for a completely different kind of planet entirely.

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Disney has distanced themselves from the Prequels where it counts, the films, in the grand scheme of things TCW and the comics are inconsequential to Disney’s bottom line when compared to the box office.
Admittedly I have yet to come to terms with my disappointment with TROS and the ST by extension, I am aware that much of the blame goes to KK and the writers - namely Abrams with his pseudo purist view of Star wars, but I am certain that the corporate heads at Disney (namely Alan horn and Iger) had a LOT of influence -the final say- on the development and production, and are the the ones that steered the ST in this direction and they should be the ones taking most of the blame primarily, its their “product” after all.

Peace is a lie
There is only passion…

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Yeah, I don’t see Disney corporate telling Lucasfilm what to do. Especially not Kennedy with her reputation at producing great movies.

Lucas turned in treatments. That is a rough story outline that goes over the story in the broadest terms. He also had some concept art done. We know that TFA started out pretty much as he intended. We don’t know much more than that. He did come back to help with the story of TROS. As far as I know it was a meeting with him, Abrams, and Terrio to discuss the movie at a treatment level or an early draft of the script.

If you have every bothered to research how movies evolve during the writing process, you will know that what Lucas wrote out was not likely to make it to the screen. The story changes greatly as it gets scripted and then it goes through many revisions, even during shooting and editing. Movies are in a constant state of flux until the final cut is sent out for duplication. So what the earliest treatments or drafts have very often does not get into the final film. Often entire scenes are rewritten and reshot and swapped out. My DVD/BR collection is full of delted and alternate scenes that would really change the nature of the film. Some are great and I wonder why they change it and some are really bad and I’m so glad they did change it. Disney’s Tangled had an entire section that was cut but is still referenced in the end credits (parts of the story are done in a rough animation while the credits role and retell the story). Star Wars movies are not an exception.

What you see in this draft script is an early concept of the film. Most of it got dumped and evidently some of it before Trevorrow left. Was it Disney? Kennedy? or Trevorrow himself? You can’t say from the available information, but Disney is the least likely. The entire creative process used in movie making is the most likely reason for all the changes. Just look at ANH and all the changes it went through. And the ones we know of from TESB and ROTJ. And the fact that Trevarrow and Connolly still have credit on the film is testament to how the final film evolved from their original concept. Ultimately this script is a snapshot of where the movie was at that point in time. Even if this had been greenlit as the shooting script, the final movie would not have been exactly this. So if you read this and see it as what we didn’t get, you are mistaken.

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I feel like we should be past the “Lucas’s treatments got dumped” discussion at this point. We know many of his ideas were the starting point for things in TFA (and TLJ to a lesser extent). The fact that they didn’t follow his treatments to the letter shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. First of all, we don’t even know how detailed these treatments were, they could have been very vague and general. Second, it’s very rare that a film of this sort will follow an initial treatment exactly (just look at Lucas original treatment for The Star Wars). Things will obviously change and evolve, and eventually you see a domino effect where I imagine it would have been counterintuitive for someone working on Episode IX to try to go back to the treatments, now that they’re so far down a different path.

The only realistic way Lucas’s story for the trilogy could have made it to the screen was if Lucas remained involved past the treatment stage, but this is something we know he didn’t want to do.

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And since I read the screenplay I thought I would give my impressions.

First, I was struck at some of the obvious reuse of dialog from the OT. I was also struck at how much this and the final TROS parallel each other. I can see now why they still have credit for the story.

Second. I hate the ending. Rey and Kylo really don’t have a fair battle. Kylo is way over powered. I do like the epilogue. I like seeing the training start right away. I like how they had an award ceremony like in ANH. That would have been the perfect ending.

Third, this reads like a really rough draft of TROS. I see all the same events, but the order and location are changed. And Palpatine is added. Like TFA is based on the Lucas treatment for VII, TROS is based on this script.

I found Mortis to be a waste in this. Moving it to a different planet made sense. Creating a Sith planet with Palpatine at the center feel more powerful. More epic. It raises the stakes. I like how in TROS the First Order hasn’t solidified their hold where here more time has passed. I do like how we see the more evil side to the First Order here, but enough is implied in the ST that it isn’t really needed. And I didn’t see much to the Stormtrooper rebellion. It was just one group with the rest of the surface battle being the locals. Other reviews make it sound like a grand and widespread stormtooper rebellion and it really isn’t. And what they ended up with in TROS has some nice echoes of this without letting it distract.

And I really don’t like a Sith teacher. That really goes against the rule of two. I just really have problems with Kylo in this script. As the last Skywalker, he really deserved better. I like that they flopped some of the scenes in for TROS. It really is clear that they continued development on the story rather than throw it out. I see so much of where TROS ended up in this. It is clearly the source.

Overall I think it is a great script. Worthy of being a early draft of a Star Wars movie. But in the end I don’t think it is up to being a shooting script.

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yotsuya said:

Yeah, I don’t see Disney corporate telling Lucasfilm what to do.

Naive would be an understatement.

Peace is a lie
There is only passion…

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yotsuya said:

And since I read the screenplay I thought I would give my impressions.

First, I was struck at some of the obvious reuse of dialog from the OT. I was also struck at how much this and the final TROS parallel each other. I can see now why they still have credit for the story.

Overall I think it is a great script. Worthy of being a early draft of a Star Wars movie. But in the end I don’t think it is up to being a shooting script.

The parallels are absolutely there, but I don’t know if I can confidently say that TROS is a huge improvement. It definitely is in some areas while in others it’s a step backward from this early draft.

Finn obviously benefits the most from Trevorrow’s script, leading the revolution Victor Hugo style. You can see the parallel in TROS with him meeting Jana or whatever her name is, and the other defected storm troopers, but it’s so lukewarm and halfway. You never really feel as thought he inspires any kind of change.

Kylo really suffers the most in this early draft. His struggle is gone as he turns into a one-dimensional character of pure evil until the very end when the script requires an instantaneous change of heart. His redemption in TROS was abrupt as well, but at least it was triggered by an act of kindness and love. Him being the one that killed Rey’s parents is an interesting idea, but the way it’s handled in this draft doesn’t really add anything to the story. At the point in which it’s revealed, Rey already seems resolved against Kylo so I don’t see that it really serves any dramatic purpose.

Rey and Poe being an item is easily the worst thing in this draft. Yuck. Although when she insisted on going on her mission alone, I did like her use of the Jedi mind trick on Poe to get him to leave her and rejoin the resistance. It was an interesting use of the common trope that we haven’t really seen before. The mind trick not used to deceive an enemy, but used rather on a friend to protect him from himself. The idea has such dramatic potential (not fully realized in this script) that I’m surprised it’s never been used in a film before.

I liked Luke’s increased role in this script mostly as a sort of guiding force for both Rey and Kylo except for his final confrontation with Kylo. You want to talk about Luke being out of character. His momentary lapse in TLJ when he considers killing Kylo is nothing compared to the ending of this draft in which he completely condemns Kylo, rejecting him out of hand, “you are no Skywalker” or whatever it is he says. I hated that coming from Luke. It’s made all the more useless when Kylo has a change of heart 2 minutes later anyway.

Anyway, it was an interesting read. Didn’t hate it, didn’t love it. I don’t think it’s better that TROS.

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pleasehello said:

I liked Luke’s increased role in this script mostly as a sort of guiding force for both Rey and Kylo except for his final confrontation with Kylo. You want to talk about Luke being out of character. His momentary lapse in TLJ when he considers killing Kylo is nothing compared to the ending of this draft in which he completely condemns Kylo, rejecting him out of hand, “you are no Skywalker” or whatever it is he says. I hated that coming from Luke. It’s made all the more useless when Kylo has a change of heart 2 minutes later anyway.

Yes, that in particular was really distasteful. The “no one’s ever really gone line” is completely ignored here, between that and Leia having completely given up on her son before the abrupt force call she makes that changes his heart.

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DominicCobb said:

I feel like we should be past the “Lucas’s treatments got dumped” discussion at this point. We know many of his ideas were the starting point for things in TFA (and TLJ to a lesser extent). The fact that they didn’t follow his treatments to the letter shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

It was certainly a surprise to George Lucas. Here’s Robert Iger himself recounting their first story meeting with George:

Robert Iger said:

Early on, Kathy brought J.J. and Michael Arndt up to Northern California to meet with George at his ranch and talk about their ideas for the film. George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations.

The truth was, Kathy, J.J., Alan, and I had discussed the direction in which the saga should go, and we all agreed that it wasn’t what George had outlined. George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded. I’d been so careful since our first conversation not to mislead him in any way, and I didn’t think I had now, but I could have handled it better. I should have prepared him for the meeting with J.J. and Michael and told him about our conversations, that we felt it was better to go in another direction. I could have talked through this with him and possibly avoided angering him by not surprising him. Now, in the first meeting with him about the future of Star Wars, George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.

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Well, frankly, that makes him seem pretty stupid.

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Yeah, what was he expecting? Did he really think Disney would go with his drafts after the intense fan backlash to the prequels? Disney wanted to distance themselves from the prequels as fast as possible, and the first step to doing that was rejecting Lucas’s drafts. Of course, now that the majority of the Star Wars fanbase has grown to appreciate the prequels, that decision has backfired horribly, but Disney had no way of seeing it back then.

My preferred Skywalker Saga experience:
I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX

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StarkillerAG said:

Of course, now that the majority of the Star Wars fanbase has grown to appreciate the prequels, that decision has backfired horribly, but Disney had no way of seeing it back then.

The prequels are still just as big of a joke today as they were 15 years ago and the majority of Star Wars fans know it. Just because people have more of a sardonic appreciation for them now doesn’t make them any less bad. Disney made the right decision rejecting Lucas’ story ideas. It’s their decisions after that which are questionable.

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StarkillerAG said:

Yeah, what was he expecting? Did he really think Disney would go with his drafts after the intense fan backlash to the prequels? Disney wanted to distance themselves from the prequels as fast as possible, and the first step to doing that was rejecting Lucas’s drafts. Of course, now that the majority of the Star Wars fanbase has grown to appreciate the prequels, that decision has backfired horribly, but Disney had no way of seeing it back then.

That’s not even it. Regardless of what Disney did or didn’t want, it’s crazy to think that once they’d brought in a new filmmaker they wouldn’t give them free reign to use or not use Lucas’s ideas, and that that filmmaker wouldn’t decide to change things. Honestly it’s kind of just Lucas’s narcissism thinking that everyone would just blindly follow what he had laid out for them without having ideas of their own.

It’s only the rabid fans who think Lucas had a brilliant 9 episode saga written out since the dawn of the franchise, and Disney steered away from it. JJ and co. likely knew that Lucas probably shat out his treatments in a couple days before he handed them over.

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Honestly it’s kind of just Lucas’s narcissism thinking that everyone would just blindly follow what he had laid out for them without having ideas of their own.

I sort of agree but I also think if it’s narcissism, it isn’t entirely unearned. He handpicked Kennedy, and chose to take the company to Iger. He spent the last 5-6 years essentially feeding story ideas to Filoni & Co, who consider it a personal point of pride to be Lucas’ conduit for ideas becoming reality. And before all that was the prequels, where he didn’t exactly have a squad of Yes Men rubber stamping everything he thought of, but he also made it a habit to essentially tell everyone who raised a concern that it didn’t matter because it was his company and ultimately he was going to do what he wanted anyway.

But I do think that the Clone Wars experience might have led directly to his believing Abrams and Arndt (and then Kasdan) were just going to carry his water the way Filoni did. That Clone Wars experience probably fooled him into believing that’s how ALL his hands-off projects would go. That it was owned by Disney wouldn’t make THAT big a difference. They’d still have the meetings once a month and they’d sit around a table and listen to him bloviate about the Force and take his word for what Star Wars is, etc. etc.

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And it is rather stupid considering what he himself knew of movie development. The fact that they kept even some of his ideas (girl Jedi seeking out Luke in isolation) is pretty good. Kennedy said they used them as a jumping off point the same way they would for any movie project with just a treatment. If he wanted them to keep his stories, he should have written full blown scripts.

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idir_hh said:

yotsuya said:

Yeah, I don’t see Disney corporate telling Lucasfilm what to do.

Naive would be an understatement.

Would it? Iger trusts his people to do what they are good at. And after 3 out of 4 films had done over $1 billion I wouldn’t be questioning Kennedy.

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I think the guys who do the Rule of Two podcast made a similar comment. There are a lot of moments in his script that feel pulled from other fantasy movies. Rey coming face to face with the Jedi in the netherworld of the Force definitely feels like Harry seeing Dumbledore in the King’s Cross purgatory scene from Deathly Hallows.

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Hal 9000 said:

As I was reading the Jedi beacon activating and spreading to other planes, I heard the score from Return of the King as the beacons of Gondor are lit.

Same.

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RogueLeader said:

I think the guys who do the Rule of Two podcast made a similar comment. There are a lot of moments in his script that feel pulled from other fantasy movies. Rey coming face to face with the Jedi in the netherworld of the Force definitely feels like Harry seeing Dumbledore in the King’s Cross purgatory scene from Deathly Hallows.

That came to mind almost immediately.

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Yeah, I feel this version it too derivative. Great for a first draft, but not shooting script quality.

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I thought those sequences were both pretty good actually. Star Wars is derivative by nature.