I’ve been reading back through your most recent half-finished draft, and I wanted to mention something that I liked.
I like how you actually used some of Leia’s lines from the film. Although these rewrites don’t have the constraints the actual films had, I do like the idea of writing Leia in a way as-if we were writing with those constraints.
I know this was a part of your earlier drafts too, but my own rewrite had sort of been drifting to Rey and Kylo having a duel on a Star Destroyer bridge in Act 1, and Kylo also being betrayed by his allies mid-battle.
Originally I had the idea of Kylo being alone and having to escape the coup-attempt, then it became a race between the Resistance and First Order for who could capture him first. I always felt the coup angle was a good way to have Kylo be forced to ally himself with our heroes, which reminds me of a similar event in a Star Wars Legends story: Knight of the Old Republic.
Revan dueled Bastila Shan on the bridge of his ship when Malik fired upon it, which knocked Revan out. Bastila and the Jedi used that opportunity to erase Revan’s memories and realign back to the Jedi cause.
There are already a lot of parallels between Revan/Bastila and Kylo/Rey, so my mind began to drift in that direction. But I can’t tell if readers would see it as plagiarism, or an intentional rhyming of history.
So it is really funny to me how you also drifted to a similar event. Did that also inspire you at all? I can’t recall if your earlier drafts had Rey dueling Kylo at the time of the crash.
I’m also really digging how you’re handling the stormtrooper stuff, with them reuniting the soldiers with their families. It does make sense for that to be the thing to break their conditioning. A part of me feels like it was happening too early in the film, though. Like, it feels as if it should be something that they do leading up to the final act. But, having them hijack a Star Destroyer early in Act 1, then dealing with the crew is a convenient way for them to deal with this issue, though, and I guess that has to be dealt with sooner rather than later.
I feel like something the DotF script had, which I think was necessary, was a moment where Finn sort of had a reminder of that the other Stormtroopers need to be saved. Finn doesn’t show much thought about it in 7 and 8, so having a moment like that is a nice way to set up the direction Finn’s story would go in for this film.