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APPENDIX 2:

MY PURPOSE IN WRITING ‘THE FIRST JEDI’

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I don’t think I need to write a lengthy critique of ‘The Last Jedi’. My script is that critique. It tracks the plot of the film we got in December of 2017 closely enough that moment-by-moment, scene-by-scene the reader should be able to see clearly why I made the choices I did as different from those of the Lucasfilm version. The story really should speak for itself, and I think it does.

I had only a few goals – some rhetorical, some narrative. Of the first type, I wanted to prove to people who liked ‘The Last Jedi’ that

using the same characters, settings and basic outlines of plot, a much more satisfying story could have been told. I kept most of the boldest narrative choices in the official version: Rey as a nobody, Snoke’s unceremonious death, the Force-chats between Rey and Kylo. These were all good, strong ideas. The biggest difference is the relationship between Rey and Luke, which – to my mind – was absolutely crucial to the success of this part of the saga.

At the same time, I wanted to prove to people who did not like ‘The Last Jedi’ that a better story could be told without jettisoning the women and people of color, as some of the more extreme fan-critics seemed to want, using their disappointment with the film as an excuse to attack the diverse cast. I had no interest in contributing to this ugly backlash. To me, that is not what Star Wars (or Star Wars fandom) should be about.

In terms of narrative goals, then, I wanted: 1) To tell a story that made logical sense and was free of major plot holes; 2) To give Luke and Rey a meaningful master-apprentice relationship;

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3) To give Luke and Leia a more substantial reunion; they are siblings with a long history together, and Leia has a right to be angry with him for abandoning her; I wanted to see that dynamic between them;

4) To keep Leia active and out of her coma so she can do meaningful things throughout the story;

5) To give Captain Phasma a much more substantial role, and to make her interesting and scary again after her failure in ‘The Force Awakens’;

6) To give Snoke not a backstory (we had none for the Emperor in the Original Trilogy, and that was fine) but a front-story: a credible set of relationships with his underlings (Kylo, Hux, Phasma, his Guards) that had some psychological depth, some realism, and some stakes;

7) To exploit various missed opportunities, like having the Praetorian Guards be the Knights of Ren and keeping them alive (so Kylo can have minions and/or rivals once Snoke is dead), or having Luke communicate with other Jedi, as he surely would have long before he fell into such a desperate funk about their legacy;

8) To add something genuinely new to the Jedi mythology, as every previous canonical episode has done, instead of just tearing it all down;

9) To exploit the fabulous creatures in ‘The Last Jedi’ in a way that’s plot-relevant, not just decorative, and that makes the environments feel real;

10) And maybe most important of all, to ‘correct’ or at least improve upon the film’s tone, which was (for me) the most objectionable single element in the Lucasfilm version of Episode VIII; I could have accepted almost everything else, including sad, defeatist Luke, if I hadn’t felt the film was parodying itself; Star Wars should be fun, but it should not make fun of itself or (indirectly) make fun of us for ever taking Star Wars seriously in the first place.

I am aware that the script is too long, though it is somewhat shorter than the version I got feedback on from readers. A feature film script should be between 90 and 120 pages, or one page per minute of screen time. Mine runs to 180 pages, or three hours. But the three-hour runtime of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ films did nothing to prevent them from being a massive critical and box office success. And, personally, I would happily have sat through a three-hour Episode VIII if it had told a good story, which I believe my script does.

Part of the reason it stretches to such length is that I am trying to fix problems with both ‘The Force Awakens’ and ‘The Last Jedi’, as well as to set up a more satisfying Episode IX (see Appendix 4). I am also cheating a bit by sneaking in the Leia/Kylo confrontation scenes that we could have expected in Episode IX. My version could have been written, filmed and released as is for

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2017. But no one would have thought to set Leia up to be killed off early in Episode IX, as she surely will have to be, when Carrie Fisher (god bless her) was still alive, healthy, and eager to play a major role in it as her co-stars Ford and Hamill had done in Episodes VII and VIII respectively.

While we are on the topic of actors, some readers have objected that Mark Hamill would not be physically capable of performing the fight scenes in my script, and I’ve often wondered if that was one of the unspoken reasons they chose to make Luke into a pacifist. Maybe they just didn’t think Hamill was up to the job, physically? Even if it were true he couldn’t do complex fight scenes, this could have been overcome with a combination of framing, editing, stunt doubles, and a judicious use of digital masking effects, grafting one performer’s face onto another’s body for crucial shots. Fans understandably wanted to see Luke back in action as a Jedi, and we only got a very pale version of that in ‘The Last Jedi’. Since my version was never going to be made anyway, I wrote it as I think most fans would have wanted to see it.

I should perhaps say that I actually have quite a bit of sympathy for the creators of these films, new and old. The Star Wars audience is so diverse and multigenerational at this point that it is arguably impossible to satisfy every segment of that audience, which is what the canonical episodes must do. As unhappy as I was with ‘The Phantom Menace’ (writing my own alternative treatments for the entire prequel series1), I later tempered my criticism of it out of sympathy for George Lucas. In time it became clear to me how miserable it must have been for him to create such a beloved series and then to have the prequels roundly rejected by a large chunk of the Star Wars fandom. It’s obvious it contributed to his selling Lucasfilm to Disney. The relentless criticism robbed the process of much fun for Lucas. With vocal fan-critics reacting to every artistic decision, there wasn’t much room to experiment.

If anything, this might be even worse under Disney, because now fans can attack the new filmmakers out of sympathy for Lucas, saying that they have deviated from his plan or failed to reach the standard that he set. I don’t know why anyone would want the job, and some high profile filmmakers (David Fincher and Ridley Scott in particular) have said as much.

1 For what they are worth, my prequel story treatments (completed in 2000) are still on the web at the

(mostly dysfunctional) web address: http://paladin.www4.50megs.com/LivingRoom.htm The individual plot treatments can be accessed at:

Episode I http://paladin.www4.50megs.com/06outlineone.htm Episode II http://paladin.www4.50megs.com/07outlinetwo.htm Episode III http://paladin.www4.50megs.com/08outlinethree.htm

A detailed analysis of the original trilogy on which my alternate prequel trilogy was based can also be found there: http://paladin.www4.50megs.com/03Analysis.htm

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Which raises the question, what does it mean to be a fan if some of us are so critical of so much of the series? There have now been ten Star Wars films, and – to my taste – only about half of them are very good. So what is one a fan of if one rejects half or more of what has been done with it?

As fans, I think we all feel there is some essence to Star Wars that transcends the flaws of specific episodes and stories, and it is this essence that we love. The problem is that we all define that essence differently. For some, the distinctive visuals (the ships, the weapons, the costumes, the environments) and the familiar characters are enough. For others, it is a question of philosophical, tonal or aesthetic fidelity to what came before. And all of these are subjective, dependent on highly idiosyncratic judgements.

It is a testament to the richness of what Lucas and his collaborators created – among them Ralph McQuarrie and Norman Reynolds (visual and production design), John Williams (music) and Ben Burtt (sound effects) – that it can inspire and even accommodate so many different interpretations of that essence, with countless spin-off novels, fan films and works of fan fiction. It is a very big sandbox, and everyone wants to play in it, even if some do get a little cranky when others don’t play according to the same rules.

If my alternate treatment of Episode VIII succeeds as a story, it is because it evokes something of what I (and maybe only a handful of readers) take to be the essence of Star Wars. If that is all it accomplishes, that’s fine. Outside of a few sensible people capable of discussing these films as films, talking about ‘The Last Jedi’ with Twitter users, while trying to attract readers to my script, has been a pretty dispiriting activity. It reminded me that part of what we love about Star Wars is grounded in a very private lived experience of spending time with these stories and characters in our homes. And something of that is lost or sullied in a strange way in public spaces, even virtual ones like Twitter.

Star Wars began as a public object – a movie, available to us only in movie theaters – and quickly became a private one through toys and videotapes. Indeed, a generation or two of Star Wars fans grew up only knowing Star Wars as a private, at-home experience. (I know my brother and I owned at least three different versions of the trilogy on VHS.) Thus, Star Wars is intimately bound up with precious personal memories of family and close friends at a crucial stage of our individual development. After all, who loves Star Wars, in whatever form, that didn’t first love it as a child?

But when Star Wars leaves our homes and bedrooms and becomes a public object again (in the Prequel era and now the Disney era) things tend to get messy. We carry that private treasure chest of Star Wars memories into the collective experience of going to a movie theater with massively inflated expectations (thanks in no small part to very slick, evocative, heartstring-

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tugging Lucasfilm marketing) and – not surprisingly – it is bound to be exhilarating for some and more like witnessing a car crash for others.

Then the post-mortem critical discussions begin, and while previously they were restricted to our circles of friends and family (people who care enough about us not to get too rude or aggressive about it), now they play out in public on the Internet and social media. That private, intimate experience with the work is lost, ruined, spoiled by that cacophony of voices telling us (rightly or wrongly) we don’t get it or we are not real fans anyway.

Thus, it’s not difficult to understand why we are so (irrationally) protective of our personal experience of something that is nonetheless shared by millions of others. And it is that private/public contradiction at the heart of the Star Wars experience that Lucasfilm is having such a difficult time navigating now.

The future of Star Wars is very much uncertain at this point, and I suspect the only viable way forward is to make different flavors of Star Wars for different parts of its diverse audience. In a sense, Lucasfilm has been doing this already with the cartoons, video games and spin-off novels, etc., that many fans simply ignore, and fair enough. But we all come back together – in hope – for the canonical episodes, and that’s when things can get ugly.

So, for better or worse, my way of healing that rift has been (twice now) to rewrite some of the stories as I would have liked to have seen them, and to avoid spending time attacking the personalities behind the current iteration of Star Wars. I can only hope that my respectful alternative finds and gives pleasure to a few other like-minded fans, probably people like me, who saw the Original Trilogy in theaters when they were kids and still hold them up as the standard bearers of excellence in the Star Wars universe. WRITING FOR REY2 One of the things I learned in writing ‘The First Jedi’ was that Rey is a very difficult character to write for. And if you think about it, the reasons are obvious. As the central protagonist of this sequel trilogy, a lot of her crucial character development has taken place long before ‘The Force Awakens’ begins.

When we meet Luke in ‘A New Hope’, he’s a 1950s-type teenager with a stable

2Thanks to Dan Sadaba of Sadabots.com for the Rey image.

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home and loving family. He’s just a kid who works on the farm, bums around with his friends, and races his T-16. Life has not made any special demands on him yet, nor inflicted any special wounds, other than being an orphan (a mostly symbolic hardship in his case).

When we first meet Rey, however, she is scrounging around the desert as a virtual slave to Unkar Plutt. We see a horribly wizened, poor old woman doing the same mind-numbing job, and we know – as does Rey – that this is all her future holds if she doesn’t escape this miserable situation. She’s a literal orphan who has already figured out how to survive on her own. Luke can’t fight worth a damn and needs Obi-Wan to step in for him when threatened at the Mos Eisley cantina, whereas Rey knows how to defend herself handily, as she demonstrates in the market around the time she meets Finn.

So we have a problem. If the Hero’s Journey is about maturing out of adolescence and into adulthood through a series of severe trials, Rey has already made two-thirds of that journey before she ever appears on screen. And by the end of ‘The Force Awakens’, she’s arguably a more powerful and fully formed Jedi than Luke is at the end of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. She has successfully fought off a much more powerful dark Jedi (Kylo), resisting him mentally and physically in a way that Luke is not able to do until the finale of ‘Return of the Jedi’. While Luke keeps his feet on the ground, is fallible, even weak, suffers and fails, and thus remains relatable for at least the first two episodes of his trilogy, Rey is floating off into the realm of the mythic hero3 in her first episode, before we’ve even really gotten to know her.

So what kind of story is the Sequel Trilogy? Where can we expect it to go? The Original Trilogy is a textbook Hero’s Journey: after being forced out of

the comfort and safety of home, Luke faces various trials, meets with initial success, then a more significant failure, then a final, triumphant success.

The Prequel Trilogy is a kind of tragedy in which a quasi-divine being (Anakin), gifted with magical powers, falls from grace, destroying countless innocent lives in the process (only later to be redeemed by his son).

What then is Rey’s arc? We’ve already seen that her story deviates wildly from that of a classical Hero’s Journey. From almost the moment we meet her, Rey is physically capable, omnicompetent, morally flawless and needs no one’s help to do the things she wants to do. If she simply wanted to escape from Unkar Plutt, we have little doubt that she could. But she is choosing to stay on Jakku, which is a very different sort of motivation. To advance her story, she

3 If you are interested in a more academic treatment of this topic, see Northrup Frye’s ‘Anatomy of Criticism’ (1957) for his typology of fictional protagonists (Mythic, Romantic, High Mimetic, Low Mimetic, Ironic) as it relates to audience identification (or what we would now call ‘relatability’).

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either has to succeed then suffer and fail, or fail and suffer then succeed. But all she has done so far is succeed, succeed, succeed. (Thus the grumbling fans.)

In short, Rey has a relatability problem. And this is not Daisy Ridley’s fault. She is a wonderful, compelling actress, and Rey’s appeal as a character is owed almost completely to Ridley’s charm as a performer. The problem is how they’ve chosen to write the character, and where they chose to begin her story.

Rey is actually a lot closer to Anakin than to Luke, in that she is presented as a kind of natural-born Jedi. (She’s arguably even more of a Chosen One than Anakin or Luke, since she needs no training or guidance to develop her powers.) Could they be setting her up to suffer a tragic fall, perhaps for later redemption? I doubt it. They don’t have enough time to do all of that in one episode (two episodes into her trilogy, she has yet to suffer any major setbacks, she never fails, and she has no moral flaws). Lucasfilm seems to want her to stand as a kind of role model to young girls, a positive icon of female empowerment, and that’s fine. But even strong women need mentors and helpers along the way. Even strong women struggle and fail sometimes. Indeed, that’s how they become – or how anyone becomes – strong.

More likely we will see a continued progression toward becoming a Jedi, Rey will defeat a major opponent (likely Kylo), and she will either literally find her parents or at least find out who they were. So it’s a Hero’s Journey, but not a very satisfying one. The pathetic life she is escaping in ‘The Force Awakens’ makes us forgiving of her initial successes. In ‘The Last Jedi’, however, she needs to start paying her dues to become a real Jedi, as Luke did in Episode V, and this she does not do. Rather than showing her struggle to become a Jedi, the film just turns her into one (Luke proves totally irrelevant), which flies in the face of everything we’ve learned over the two previous trilogies.

Many have praised this as a bold and innovative choice. They say, “To hell with the Skywalkers and ‘Chosen Ones’. Give us a hero who is a nobody. Democratize being a Jedi.” Fine. But, as we’ve seen, Rey is more of a Chosen One than Luke or Anakin ever were. By simply giving Rey advanced Force abilities and making her a match for every situation she encounters, she has ceased to be relatable. It’s a pure wish-fulfillment fantasy. So it’s no surprise that it has annoyed many fans of the Original Trilogy, and its hero, Luke.

We came to these new films with tremendous goodwill toward Luke, and we wanted to see him do what he was asked to by passing on what he had learned. If we could see him doing that with Rey, if we saw him develop a caring relationship with her as his apprentice, our love for Luke would transfer to Rey. She would become his heir, even if they don’t share blood. Instead, Luke is denied the honor of being an effective teacher and mentor. Why? So she can be a sui generis superhero? Is that more interesting?

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Basically, what they are trying to do in these sequels is something extremely difficult: to graft a new protagonist (Rey) onto an established story and give her a meaningful and interesting arc, while giving the previous one (Luke) a fitting send off. For some reason, though, they have chosen not do the most obvious and emotionally satisfying thing: to have the elder hero willingly and gladly pass the torch onto the junior one. Instead, Luke is diminished in order to elevate Rey, leaving many fans unhappy with Luke’s transformation, and resentful of Rey’s unsatisfying and unearned successes.

So I feel bad for Rey, and for Daisy Ridley. They’ve been robbed of an complex and compelling story arc, which is what I have tried to give Rey in ‘The First Jedi’. I think both the character and the actress deserved better.

She also faces the problem that the stage is still so crowded with characters from the Original Trilogy that she doesn’t have enough room to really be the protagonist of her own story. My version doesn’t fix this completely, but it does – I think – give her new depth and dimension, a richer backstory, as well as interesting conflicts and real connections with other characters. She makes mistakes, she’s injured, she faces moral dilemmas, and she fails insofar as she allows herself to be manipulated by Kylo Ren. She still has work to do in becoming the hero she can and should be. There is still somewhere interesting for her story to go. TONE, HUMOR & PARODY

Arguing about films is fun but ultimately a bit pointless, because in the end a lot of it comes down to individual taste, and there really is no arguing with taste. My goal has never been to tell people who liked ‘The Last Jedi’ not to like it. It has simply been to put down on paper an Episode VIII story that would deliver something much closer to what I think most fans of the Original Trilogy wanted and expected from these new sequels. ‘The Force Awakens’, though far from perfect, substantially delivered, and a lot its success has to do with recreating the look, feel and tone of the Original Trilogy.

Like ‘The Phantom Menace’, ‘The Last Jedi’ was received badly by many fans due in part to its tone, its humor and its taste. The style of humor in ‘The Last Jedi’ owes a good deal to the ironic, self-referential sensibility of shows like ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (which I have never seen) and of course the Marvel films, some of which I have seen and enjoyed. But Marvel is at liberty to create its own tone. Star Wars, on the other hand, has a long established and well-loved tone. The often bizarre, cringe-worthy stabs at humor in ‘The Last Jedi’ absolutely ruined the film for me. I could do nothing on my second viewing (and I will not watch the film again) but close my eyes and ears and

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turn away at key moments to try to salvage what love and respect I had for these characters and this universe. It was not easy.

So let me say it plainly: tone is EVERYTHING in cinema, not least in its more fantastical genres. Take any film you might admire or that is widely regarded as a good film, from ‘The Godfather’ to ‘2001’ to genre classics like ‘Alien’, ‘BladeRunner’, ‘Jaws’, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, ‘Seven’, ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘The Lord of the Rings’, or ‘The Matrix’: each has a very distinct tone and style, and they are a huge part of what makes these films unique, memorable, persuasive works of cinematic art. And where does the border between drama, comedy and parody lie? It falls squarely on the fault lines of tone.

I still don’t understand the (I think) perverse desire to play with the well established tone of Star Wars in ‘The Last Jedi’, or to ‘subvert’ it, nor why Lucasfilm didn’t anticipate – or seem to care – that this radical new style of humor would alienate many fans. As in the Original Trilogy, the humor in ‘The Force Awakens’ was grounded in the situations and the characters. It had a few self-referential jokes (the number of parsecs in the Kessel run, Leia’s hairstyle, “That’s not how the Force works!”), but it did not suffer from an overall tone of self-parody as ‘The Last Jedi’ does.4

Take that first meeting between Kylo and Poe. The captured commander boldly tries to mock his enemy by joking about who should speak first and saying he can’t really understand Kylo through the mask. But Kylo does not participate in this routine, and is in no way diminished by it. We have only just met him, and he remains as fearsome an enemy as we could hope for. Poe’s attempt at humor is the only avenue he has left to assert himself in an extremely precarious situation that might well soon lead to his murder. He is in real peril. So the scene remains tense, and tells us a great deal about both his character and Kylo’s. To do that in the first few minutes of the film, to risk undermining your villain before you have fully established him, shows how well conceived both the characters and the humor were. It worked brilliantly.

Compare that with the comedy routine at the start of ‘The Last Jedi’, where Poe openly mocks Hux in front of his entire staff. Do we fear or respect Hux? Is Hux a formidable enemy after this? Does the film remain tense or have a sufficiently strong set of antagonists to drive the story forward and keep the stakes high? I would argue it does not. The humor demolishes Hux, as does the cartoonishly sadistic Snoke when he drags Hux around like a ragdoll in front of his men. Hux, a figure of Hitlerian evil in the previous film, has

4 Notice that all of these jokes are connected to the character of Han Solo (a low mimetic character

in Frye’s scheme; see footnote 3), one of the great sources of humor in the Original Trilogy, and also our cynical, sarcastic, relatable surrogate in the strange, fantastical world of the story.

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now been reduced to a human mop. This works against everything the story needs to do, and for what? A few cheap, out-of-place jokes.

‘The Last Jedi’ does this over and over again in moments and scenes that are (to my mind) in such painfully bad taste that I can’t bring myself to mention them here. For me, it was unforgiveable, particularly where it tainted Luke and Leia, who get only one tiny, superficial scene together (actually, Luke is not even there) mostly comprised of a throwaway joke about her hair (one lazily recycled from ‘The Force Awakens’, no less). This is not what fans of the Original Trilogy wanted. And it was not necessary. It was insulting.

The humor in the Original Trilogy rested on a very simple premise: it came from the lower-order characters5 (droids, Ewoks, Jawas, Chewbacca) and from the main characters (Han, Luke, Leia) only when they were palling around as friends. When they were in political mode (Leia with Tarkin and Vader; plotting the attacks in Episodes IV and VI; Han and company surprised by Vader on Bespin), there was no humor. And the Jedi, outside of Yoda’s initial zany, Muppet-like introduction (which served a very specific plot purpose), were basically humorless. No one is cracking jokes in Vader’s presence; Yoda quits goofing around and gets down to the serious work of training Luke; and the Emperor is not hitting Luke in the head with a lighsaber like they are in a ‘Three Stooges’ film. It’s all about the tone.

‘The Force Awakens’ largely carried on this tradition, and of course it had Harrison Ford – the best comic actor in the series – to help set that tone and carry it off. It is simply part of his unique toolkit as an actor that he can move quickly from comedy to pathos and back again, and take the audience along with him, in a way that – arguably – Mark Hamill (or, at least, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker) cannot. They should not have put any part of the burden of making ‘The Last Jedi’ amusing onto his shoulders. We don’t want to laugh at Luke at this stage of his story. We want to respect him, be awed and moved by him. But at nearly every turn the film undermines his most emotionally and philosophically powerful moments with needless attempts at humor.

If I could change only one thing about this film it would be this grating, disrespectful tone, and that is what I have attempted to do with my alternative script. Luke does have a few moments of humor in ‘The First Jedi’, but they spring naturally from the situations and from the genuine affection he has for both Rey and Leia. The humor is not coming from some self-aware intellectual place outside the film. It is humor, not parody.

Like many other fans, I wanted to see a good Star Wars film, not a smart-alecky parody of a Star Wars film. I wanted to spend time with beloved

5Either ‘low mimetic’ or ‘ironic’ in Frye’s terminology; see footnote 3.

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characters from my childhood, to see how they had matured, even suffered and failed, but not to see them mocking and winking at themselves (and us), self-aware that they are performing in a Star Wars film. Let Marvel and Buffy do that if they wish, but keep it out of Star Wars, please!

___________ I said I wasn’t going to critique the film at length, and now here I am eleven pages in, still talking about why some of us were so unhappy with ‘The Last Jedi.’ Oh, well. I guess I need to get a few of these things off my chest.

I can’t help thinking that if Disney had come out when they purchased Lucasfilm and said,

“We are going to bring back all of your favorite characters, but only to kill them off one by one; some of them will never share another scene together; others will have only short, superficial interactions played mostly for laughs; and Luke will neither successfully train any new Jedi nor will he fight another lightsaber battle with a worthy opponent,”

there would have been outrage, as well there should have been, because the opposite of these were all perfectly reasonable fan expectations, and none of the choices Lucasfilm has made were strictly necessary.6 You can advance these characters in terms of age and maturity, you can show that they have changed, lost some of their ideals, been corrupted even, but they should be respected. They should be treated seriously. And they should get meaningful time together – otherwise, why bring them back at all? While our fond memories are being tarnished, these older characters are also sucking up oxygen that the new characters could use, and annoying fans of the Original Trilogy who might well have preferred to just leave these characters alone.

I wanted to learn something new about the Jedi from these films. Every previous sequel has added something to the mythology. ‘The Last Jedi’ arguably adds nothing, other than some new Force powers, some of which are very badly set-up and badly executed. All Luke tells us about the history of the Jedi are things we already know from the prequels. None of it is ‘new’ in that sense. (And why does he call Palpatine ‘Darth Sidious’, when he has only ever known him as the Emperor? Has he been watching the Blu-Rays?)

I wanted, in my alternative script, to expand our understanding of the Jedi by – yes – commenting on the Jedi legacy, telling us what Luke has learned about or thinks of the old Jedi regime, but also by giving us a more expansive,

6Though I thought Han’s death was well handled and necessary to help establish Kylo’s character.

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deeper, richer notion of how the Force works in the universe. We got none of that in ‘The Last Jedi’. The mythology was mostly torn down, and not to replace it with anything new. Most horrifying and offensive of all was Yoda’s painful scene, cackling away like an idiot as he trashes everything for which he has stood for centuries (another classic character parodied and mocked into extinction). Ugh. I don’t even know what to say…

Lastly, it’s my bias that Star Wars is not science fiction but fantasy in science fiction garb. And some of my favourite Star Wars moments come from the fabulous creatures that populate its worlds. Think of the relationship between Luke and his Taun-Taun, how genuine a relationship it seems, like that of a rider and his horse. And how just one creature like that can suggest an entire world. In that regard, less truly is more. There are some wonderful creatures in ‘The Last Jedi’ and I was very much looking forward to seeing them play some fundamentally important role in the story. But we got very little of this. They were all more or less throwaways. The Porgs did not offend me in and of themselves (I love the Ewoks, incidentally), but they served no purpose within the story, other than to mask the presence of puffins on the set of Ahch-To in Ireland, and fair enough.

Something we have never seen in the canonical Star Wars films is Force-sensitive animals (though I understand they have appeared in ‘The Clone Wars’, which I have never seen). This felt like something new and interesting to explore, something that would inspire wonder and awe at the richness of the Star Wars universe, which ‘The Last Jedi’ sorely lacks. It does not transport us to another world. It feels rather depressingly like our own world, with the same familiar environments and sterile political problems.

I am not opposed to having politics in Star Wars (there is a good deal of politics in my alternative script), but this is the second last chapter in a nine-part saga. Give us something to really wonder at, something to make us feel that we have only just scratched the surface of this incredible universe of people and worlds and creatures. Give us something to remind us why we like to hear stories about magical people and places that don’t exist in the first place. Do something awe-inspiring. That is what I have tried to give back to Episode VIII, as presumptuous (perhaps) as that might sound. Only you can judge if I have succeeded in doing so.

In any case, this script was motivated by the same thing that motivates all episodic storytelling: the desire to spend more time with characters we love.

And to create something beautiful. I hope that ‘The First Jedi’ is something beautiful. And I hope it satisfies

your desire for a Luke and a Leia – as well as a Rey – that you can love again. May the Force be with us All! —The First Jedi Screenwriter