StarkillerAG said:
I wouldn’t be too discouraged by that video. I’ve seen it already, it’s entertaining but it’s basically 5,000 nitpicks. I think this movie can still be salvageable, regardless of any potential plot holes.

You may be right. I’ve watched the first half, though, and I fully agree with much of the criticism. At the very least it demonstrates that a lot of dumb choices went into this “story.” I suspect that removing said dumb choices would leave us with pretty much a 1-hour TV special.

That premise [i.e., map to Exogol at the beginning of the TFA segment] could potentially work, but you’d have to either remove or change a lot of dialogue.

I’ll have to think more about it, of course, but at the moment it seems doable without that extra work. Some plot points would hang on the opening crawl. The TFA crawl explicitly mentions “a clue to Luke’s whereabouts”; wouldn’t take much tweaking to alter that to “a map [or “clue”] to a Sith world.” Thus in the opening Poe scene itself, when he and the old-timer refer to a “map,” I’d simply cut mentions of “Skywalker,” and from the crawl it would be obvious that the map referred to is for Exogol.

I would have the same opening scene as in TFA - except that Poe isn’t captured. I’d cut the scene just as BB-8 is being taken up into the X-wing. I’d also cut Rey on Jakku, the entire defector-stormtrooper subplot (which went sadly undeveloped), and Maaz Kenata’s fortress. Not sure what I’d put in between, but it wouldn’t be long before the Resistance is going into battle against Starkiller Base.

I’m going with the “Rey Nobody” angle - but she isn’t a wunderkind. Instead she’s an orphan who, as the movie opens, is already deep into Jedi training with Luke. The mashup would center around the Rey-Ben dynamic.