Good ideas all!

And VVPizza, I have to agree. I find myself constantly coming back to that line as the ending, which makes me think that an earlier formulation of the crawl could work with some adjustment.

EPISODE VII
THE FORCE AWAKENS

The galaxy is in crisis.
Luke Skywalker, striving
to restore the legendary
Jedi Order, has vanished.

Emboldened by the Jedi’s
absence, agents of the
IMPERIAL FIRST ORDER
have risen from a sinister
hidden base to proclaim
across the New Republic
that anyone who seeks
Luke Skywalker’s return
shall be destroyed.

In an act of RESISTANCE,
a band of rebels with the
support of the Republic
has sent its most daring
pilot to Jakku, desperate
to find the last Jedi and
restore peace and justice
to the darkening stars…

After so many attempts at figuring out a better way to explain the Republic’s relationship with the Resistance, it feels a bit silly to go back to the exact wording of the theatrical crawl, but I genuinely have no better answer. The Resistance is a paramilitary organization that is not sanctioned or directly controlled by the Republic, so it feels wrong to say that here. It genuinely seems to be the case that the Resistance gets by with only the tacit acceptance of the Republic. At least this way I can keep the pilot and Jakku lines, which I wasn’t able to fit in this prior incarnation of the crawl.

This means that this crawl checks basically all the boxes for me. The only potential issue is that there’s no direct statement of how the First Order arose from the Empire, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One of the problems of the theatrical crawl was how the First Order could be so powerful after rising from the ‘ashes of the Empire’ in Luke’s absence, but if it is never established that the Empire has been completely destroyed then the First Order can be of any power level that a viewer wants to imagine, based on how completely they believe the Empire was defeated decades ago.