Updates! I’ve worked out a new opening crawl that I am pretty happy with.
Episode VII
THE LAST SKYWALKER AWAKENS
Luke Skywalker has vanished.
In his absence, the sinister
FIRST ORDER has risen from
the ashes of the Empire and
will stop at nothing until
Skywalker, the last Jedi, has
been destroyed.
As the peaceful New
Republic struggles to fight
this resurgent menace,
General Leia Organa gathers
her allies and leads a brave
RESISTANCE. She is
desperate to find her brother
Luke and restore hope to the
galaxy.
Searching for clues to Luke’s
whereabouts, the First Order
has intercepted Leia’s most
daring pilot on the desert
planet of Jakku…
It borrows from both the theatrical TFA crawl and Hal9000’s one for Restructured, but I realized recently that I also need to give a drastically different impression of the Republic (or the New Republic, as it’s called in other post-ROTJ canon stuff now) than in the theatricals or even the other fan edits I’ve drawn from.
Throughout this edit there’s virtually no mention of a central government or wider political context at all. TFA hit the reset button with Starkiller Base and it’s mentioned by Hux offhandedly at the start of TLJ but other than that the Sequels largely ignore any political implications (which was to their benefit, just imo). I’m simply following through with that and excising it from the context of this story entirely.
The line “the peaceful New Republic struggles to fight this resurgent menace” attempts to do this and bring the perception of the state of the galaxy in line with the new canon books, wherein the government almost completely demilitarised after the formation of the New Republic. This is basically why they’re of no help, and Leia is left going “oh shit there’s a big dark side-y army spreading across the galaxy and we have no way to stop it” and doing her own thing.
It also helps focus the First Order’s intent on Skywalker and eradicating the Jedi, for the time being. The whole take over the universe thing seems implied in their mandate by being a big evil fascist army.
At least that’s how I hope it will all come across. I’ll see if I can work that Hux line in TLJ to remove mention of the Republic or change it to something else. I will also likely keep tweaking at the title crawl endlessly, too (and hopefully fix that irritating bug with the commas).
Also, I have also begun working on subtitles! Turns out five hours of film is a lot of work to caption! I’m about 10% of the way there, so, progress nonetheless.