Colin Trevorrow replaced with Abrams as 'Star Wars: Episode IX' Director

[Lord Revan]

If you ask me I'd go either with "Rey is a nobody" or if you absolutely must have Rey as Luke's daughter have it so that Luke fathered her indirectly meaning someone used Luke's DNA/Sperm to concive Rey but Luke himself wasn't involved and isn't even aware that it happened, except in a vague "there's a disturbance in the Force" kind of way.

[Khaat]

She's a clone made from his hand? Would explain why Anakin's light saber reacted the way it did....

[JLTucker]

If you ask me I'd go either with "Rey is a nobody" or if you absolutely must have Rey as Luke's daughter have it so that Luke fathered her indirectly meaning someone used Luke's DNA/Sperm to concive Rey but Luke himself wasn't involved and isn't even aware that it happened, except in a vague "there's a disturbance in the Force" kind of way.

Eww. That's some soap opera bullshit and would not work whatsoever in this series. There's no BS twists of that magnitude to use as precedent.

[Thanas]

She's a clone made from his hand? Would explain why Anakin's light saber reacted the way it did....

Timothy Zahn called, he wants his plot points back.

[Mange]

I still maintain that Rey being Luke's daughter is the most obvious move, and heavily implied (weather or not Abrams intended it). They'd have to work hard, I suspect, to make me buy anything else.

I have grown increasingly fond of the "Rey is a successor to/reincarnation of Anakin" theory, but that doesn't necessarily say anything about her parentage.

The saga movies are about the Skywalkers and since the Official Site and others uses the "Skywalker saga" in promotion for TLJ, I think she's in some way at least is related to the Skywalkers. I would be very surprised otherwise.

[Galvatron]

Personally I had also believed largely the same thing as Galvetron's theory, but it has changed of late. Unless the new EU is completely irrelevant, that theory can't possibly be true. The novel Bloodline indicates that Ben Solo and Luke were off on some Jedi adventure after Rey was dumped on Jakku, which means Ben can't have fallen yet in order to dump her there.

I read Bloodline, but I don't recall what it said that ruled out my proposed scenario. Can you elaborate with quotes?

[Adam Reynolds]

It is simply a consequence of age and the spot in the timeline. 28 ABY for Bloodlines vs 34 ABY for TFA. Rey had obviously aged more than six years after that point. A direct quote gives no real information other than that Luke and Ben were evidently together and out of contact from Leia or Han. At several points Leia wonders where Ben is, with no actual information given.

It is a bit ambiguous in that we never hear anything explicit about what Luke or Ben are doing other than that they are out of contact, and it is certainly possible than Ben had already fallen to the Dark Side, but that would be a bit of a stretch given that Leia gives absolutely no indication of this whatsoever. I suppose it is possible that Ben already fell and Leia simply did not know, but that would make Luke a bit of an asshole. Almost as much as abandoning his daughter on Jakku.

In any case, I suppose you are right that this does not rule out your theory.

As a side note, this is a point at which the new canon is a major letdown relative to the old. Luke, Han, and Leia have rather lousy lives after the events of the films, with the trio broken apart and with little to none of the togetherness one would expect after the OT. So much for any semblance of a happy ending for any of them.

[The Romulan Republic]

It is simply a consequence of age and the spot in the timeline. 28 ABY for Bloodlines vs 34 ABY for TFA. Rey had obviously aged more than six years after that point. A direct quote gives no real information other than that Luke and Ben were evidently together and out of contact from Leia or Han. At several points Leia wonders where Ben is, with no actual information given.

I'd rather disregard bloodlines for ruining a good theory, personally. But if we must adhere to it, well, it doesn't rule out Rey being a Skywalker, at any rate.

It is a bit ambiguous in that we never hear anything explicit about what Luke or Ben are doing other than that they are out of contact, and it is certainly possible than Ben had already fallen to the Dark Side, but that would be a bit of a stretch given that Leia gives absolutely no indication of this whatsoever. I suppose it is possible that Ben already fell and Leia simply did not know, but that would make Luke a bit of an asshole. Almost as much as abandoning his daughter on Jakku.

In any case, I suppose you are right that this does not rule out your theory.

Yeah, but it sounds like a major stretch.

As a side note, this is a point at which the new canon is a major letdown relative to the old. Luke, Han, and Leia have rather lousy lives after the events of the films, with the trio broken apart and with little to none of the togetherness one would expect after the OT. So much for any semblance of a happy ending for any of them.

Well, the thing about the world is that no happy ending is permanent. They had their hour of triumph, and a couple decades of relative peace after by the sound of it. That's not nothing. But... the world kept turning, so to speak.

Arguably, everyone eventually has an "unhappy ending", because we are all subject to death.

Of course, one hopes to live on, metaphorically, through their achievements and/or offspring. And that story, for Luke, Han, and Leia, is not yet finished being written.

But I am bitter about not getting a reunion of the three on screen.

Edit: We also don't know what's going to happen to Luke and Leia yet, though to be fair, the odds favour something unpleasant right now.

[The Romulan Republic]

Another thing I'd point out reg. Bloodlines is that, while Disney doesn't make the same distinctions between different levels of canon that the old Lucas management did, films have always trumped books, and I expect that to continue to be the case. If a film director/writer wants to do something that runs afoul of some book only die-hard fans generally read, the book will get quietly put aside.

[Galvatron]

And then the LFL Story Group gets to pull retcon out of its collective ass. We should be used to that by now.

[ray245]

Another thing I'd point out reg. Bloodlines is that, while Disney doesn't make the same distinctions between different levels of canon that the old Lucas management did, films have always trumped books, and I expect that to continue to be the case. If a film director/writer wants to do something that runs afoul of some book only die-hard fans generally read, the book will get quietly put aside.

SW has never adhered to a policy which gave writers of novels or TV series writers the same influence as movie directors. The problem is when you have to keep changing directors.

I would really like to see Abrams direct TLJ, if only to force him to fix his mess in the first place. He created a trilogy with his bog-standard mystery box trick when the box itself is empty. Most of the time he gets away with it because he usually runs away from the actual finale of his TV series (aka Lost) and let others clean up his mess/handle the fallout.

Now, he's in a situation where he really, really had to think about who Rey really is, and what exactly is the First Order. However, given the lack of actual time left for the project, he'll probably come up with a half-ass script with an ending left everything dangling, because that will be a story for the directors of Ep 10, 11 and 12 to fix.

[eMeM]

I wouldn't disregard Bloodlines, considering Rian Johnson's involvement.

https://mobile.twitter.com/pablohidalgo ... 6645772289

[Elfdart]

Why do people suddenly hate TFA so much? Is it just because its expected in internet fandoms that all new Star Wars films will be bad? Is it about JJ Abrams specifically? It feels sometimes like "everything Abrams makes is horrible" has become a ubiquitous meme, not because his work is actually that bad, but because a few bitter Trekkies started whining and the meme took off, as memes do.

There is no logic to Abrams' films. He just creates a picture of OBVIOUSLY COOL SCENE followed by OBVIOUSLY COOL SCENE followed by HAVE YOU SEEN HOW COOL THIS SCENE IS YET. While totally skipping out on everything that makes a movie actually good, like direction and internal logic. He is little better than Michael Bay. Well actually he is worse as Transformers was actually watchable.

I can understand stories not making any sense and even like them if everything else is perfect. Like for example BSG's series finale made no sense but I still enjoyed it for being a character story and the music and the performances. But there is nothing outstanding in Abram's stuff to make up for the glaring deficiencies.

Disney has made one sci-fi film worthy of repeat viewings: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I might be interested in seeing a sequel to that (Kirk Douglass is still available -why not?) but Disney Star Wars? After the last two films I've had enough.

J.J. Abrams is a total jobber of a filmmaker, like a cover band that does medleys of other bands' hits, then adds insult to injury by finishing with a 12-minute, purely masturbatory guitar solo. I knew this going in, so "expectations" weren't a problem.

I keep pointing out that not only is TFA a lazy regurgitation of ANH, but worse still it's also a rehash of Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Someday, when I have time to spare I might just write a detailed description of why this is the case, but I'll just stick to the Death Star/Starkiller/Grazer One:

The Death Star in ANH and ROTJ is carefully set up as an important set-piece and from beginning to end, the movies detail what it is, what it does, and what its defenses are. You have scenes where the villains worry about the Rebels getting the plans and how much danger they might be in. ANH: We need the plans to try to find a weakness. ROTJ: We need to sneak in and sabotage the deflector shield so the fleet can destroy it.

Starkiller is used without any tension (unlike the scene where Tarkin tries to coerce Leia), and the infiltration has almost zero buildup as well. ROTJ could have been about 30 minutes shorter if all Han had to do was hyperspace through the deflector shield, land unopposed and stroll into the shield bunker like Lenny and Squiggy barging into Laverne & Shirley's apartment. It's pure ass-pull of the worst kind and shows that Abrams & Co don't have a creative bone in their bodies.

Grazer One is handled much better than Starkiller Base. The filmmakers build up tension as the Joint Chiefs desperately try to shut down the killer satellite before it blows up a town in China. Then Ryback painstakingly fights his way to the villains' control center, only the main bad guy has already sent the signal to fire. Ryback shoots him in the gut through his laptop and that magically exposes Grazer One to be destroyed by the Air Force. Notice the similarities? In TFA and Under Siege 2, the finale is the result of the filmmakers' failure to come up with a credible foil for the villains' terror weapon, and resorting to what appears to be something they just made up at the last second. It sucks. It sucks HARD -and in any event, Under Siege 2 did it better. When your climactic battle scene in a Star Wars movie is outdone by a second-tier Steven Seagal movie, it's pretty goddamned lame.

[Galvatron]

In retrospect, yeah, it may have been better if what Lor San Tekka had for Poe was more of a warning message from Luke about the Starkiller than some map fragment.

[Adam Reynolds]

It would have been better without Starkiller Base at all. Why did we need yet another Death Star? Especially not one that was made to be bigger and better. The finale should have been consistent with the rest of the film, being about the First Order wanting to find Luke first so that they could kill him with an orbital bombardment before he could train Rey or do anything else to stop whatever the First Order is planning.

Thus you have a raid on the First Order space station or star destroyer where Rey is being held with the intent to stop them through any means neccesary and hopefully get back their section of the map. While she is being rescued by Han and Finn, who could still use Han's hyperspace trick, Leia's fleet and Poe's fighters are launching a raid on the supporting vessels. When the opportunity arises, Hux capture's Leia's ship in a tractor beam, knowing that she likely has the same section of the map as Rey. The drama is thus about destroying the enemy ship/station so that Leia can escape. Meanwhile she is planning a suicidal ramming attempt so that most of her crew's escape pods and her supporting ships can escape with the data.

Another major element that would have made for a much better film is if Hux were shown to be much smarter than most of his Imperial predecessors, ideally almost Thrawn like, in which he is highly genre savvy. Thus Hux is able to deduce that Leia needs the section of the map that they have, and that she would keep it on her personal ship, which is not the obvious flagship of the fleet. He also planned for the attack to occur, as he wanted the opportunity to steal the final map section and upstage Kylo Ren after he let it go. As it was, no member of the First Order was in any way intimidating by the end of the movie.

You thus largely have a battle between Han's clever improv and Leia's iron will against a chessmaster, which actually gives the battle proper stakes and an enemy that is a genuine threat. Kylo Ren and Phasma are somewhat less of a threat than they appear, but Hux could nicely be the inverse. It would also set things up nicely for the next film, as Han was the only one clever enough to be a threat to Hux in that sense.

Unfortunately all of this would have required that Abrams is as smart as someone like Timothy Zahn when it comes to writing action as chess scenes, which is not exactly likely.

[Crazedwraith]

I think we need to see the next two films to see how necessary StarKiller Base is. If the films make a big deal out the loss of those Republic planets/Fleet, then it might needed to have happened in some form if not necessarily the crappy way it did in the film.

[Adam Reynolds]

Given that I don't think this was planned at all, that can't be true. Rian Johnson will probably make something out of what he was given, but that doesn't make it necessary in the first place. A better solution to that problem is that the New Republic lacks a true central government, forcing Leia to make do with the forces she can scrounge together with the resistance.

[Elfdart]

It would have been better without Starkiller Base at all. Why did we need yet another Death Star? Especially not one that was made to be bigger and better. The finale should have been consistent with the rest of the film, being about the First Order wanting to find Luke first so that they could kill him with an orbital bombardment before he could train Rey or do anything else to stop whatever the First Order is planning.

I don't have a problem with a new Death Star. It's not like people in real life stopped building warships or bombers after the previous ones were destroyed -they built newer, bigger and better ones. It's just that Starkiller was so stupid and made no sense. Instead of a huge mobile station that could hyperspace around, zapping planets that get out of line, they have a whole planet that shoots its death rays through hyperspace and...

It shows Abrams put about 30 seconds of thought into this whole movie. He doesn't bother with things like the consequences of unleashing a terror weapon on a major power (they will come down on you like a hundred loads of bricks), so he has to conveniently park the Republic's entire fleet at the capitol so the political and military wings of the government are destroyed because he's too shallow a filmmaker to even contemplate, let alone plan out, a cat-and-mouse campaign where the good guys are trying to hunt down a faction of galactic neo-Nazis. It's as if during The Sum of All Fears, not only was Baltimore blown up, but the entire US Navy and Air Force were conveniently stationed in the blast radius just to make a neo-Nazi Austrian state a serious military threat.

He had to get rid of the Republic and the fleet because that's the only way to give the New Order the upper hand against Leia's band of rebels and re-set the whole shebang because had no clue whatsoever about how to deal with the setting.

Unfortunately all of this would have required that Abrams is as smart as someone like Timothy Zahn when it comes to writing action as chess scenes, which is not exactly likely.

The real problem is that the one person who has shown the right amount of creativity, vision and artistic talent for Star Wars is retired. There are other filmmakers with creative vision (Cameron, Scott, Del Toro), but they're off making their own movies. The best Lucasfilm can hope for is finding competent hacks and more importantly, hiring them from the start, rather than bringing them in late to untangle the mess left behind by incompetent hacks. I guess what I'm saying is that I'd rather have the franchise handled like James Bond, where Guy Hamilton and John Glen kept the ship afloat when Terence Young left; than the way Star Trek has been handled, where they let Shatner direct.

[Civil War Man]

Kylo Ren and Phasma are somewhat less of a threat than they appear, but Hux could nicely be the inverse.

Sometimes it's pretty amazing how tiny changes can fix some problems. Even without changing anything else about TFA, Phasma could have been much less of a non-entity if Finn had fought her instead of the random faceless memetrooper everyone calls TR-8R. It would have established her as a threat, cemented her place as Finn's nemesis, and given some level of catharsis when Finn gets his revenge over her in the third act.

[The Romulan Republic]

I like that idea as well.

We do get the sense, briefly, in the film that there's a history between Finn and Phasma. She's the commander of the troops he's serving with. She's the one who is suspicious of him after he refuses to fire and confronts him, prompting his decision to flee and setting most of the rest of the film, or at least Finn's part of it, in motion. And then Finn gets the better of her at the end (albeit in a rather degrading and anti-climactic fasion).

But there's nothing in between.

It would have made so much sense to make Phasma Finn's personal nemesis, while Kylo Ren is Rey's. It fits with the Phasma/Boba Fett parallels as well (both are largely faceless and voiceless minor villains, at least in the films, who get a lot of fans for their cool armour). Have her be Finn's personal nemesis as Fett was Han's.

Mind, I love that the First Order apparently has random stormtroopers trained in hand to hand combat with lightsabre users. But I do think making Phasma the one who fought Finn in that scene would have benefited the film over all. And showing her survive that shot would also establish that that fancy armour is good for something besides looking cool.

Fortunately, its not too late to fix this (well, I guess they've already filmed the next film, but we won't know for a few months). They could easily still make Phasma Finn's main adversary in Episode VIII. Given the rumours that Phasma will have a bigger role this time, I hope that's the route they go. It also fits nicely with her last appearance in Episode VII- Finn disgraced and humiliated her, so its only natural that she should want revenge against him in particular.

[Adam Reynolds]

While TR-8R at least looked cool, it was beyond stupid to throw away your gun to fight hand to hand against an untrained lightsaber wielder. I just looked it up, and he literally threw away his gun and shield to fight hand to hand against Finn before getting shot in the back by Han. She would have been seen as stupid if she threw away her gun.

Phasma almost seems like a parody of Boba Fett, though I seriously doubt it was that clever.

[Galvatron]

It might have been interesting if Phasma's armor was so shiny because it was made of a special lightsaber-resistant material. Then she could have confidently engaged Finn in melee combat with whatever weapon she had for the occasion.

It'd be even better if some mention was made of her being a regular sparring partner of Kylo Ren's, just to emphasize that she can be a challenge to even a trained Force-wielder.

She was definitely a wasted opportunity.

[Patroklos]

I like that idea as well.

We do get the sense, briefly, in the film that there's a history between Finn and Phasma. She's the commander of the troops he's serving with. She's the one who is suspicious of him after he refuses to fire and confronts him, prompting his decision to flee and setting most of the rest of the film, or at least Finn's part of it, in motion. And then Finn gets the better of her at the end (albeit in a rather degrading and anti-climactic fasion).

But there's nothing in between.

It would have made so much sense to make Phasma Finn's personal nemesis, while Kylo Ren is Rey's. It fits with the Phasma/Boba Fett parallels as well (both are largely faceless and voiceless minor villains, at least in the films, who get a lot of fans for their cool armour). Have her be Finn's personal nemesis as Fett was Han's.

Mind, I love that the First Order apparently has random stormtroopers trained in hand to hand combat with lightsabre users. But I do think making Phasma the one who fought Finn in that scene would have benefited the film over all. And showing her survive that shot would also establish that that fancy armour is good for something besides looking cool.

Fortunately, its not too late to fix this (well, I guess they've already filmed the next film, but we won't know for a few months). They could easily still make Phasma Finn's main adversary in Episode VIII. Given the rumours that Phasma will have a bigger role this time, I hope that's the route they go. It also fits nicely with her last appearance in Episode VII- Finn disgraced and humiliated her, so its only natural that she should want revenge against him in particular.

No offense, but while this would increase Phasma's threat scoring its also the shallow way to do this. One of the most menacing characters of ESB, the one officer who you know you don't want to be on the opposing side of, is General Veers. He has few scenes, few lines, but when we do see or hear from him he exudes competent command threat. Veers didn't have to beat anyone up to be menacing and dangerous. Phasma is a commander, and SW is not a 100% action movie. The other commander TFA has, Hux, is a temper tantrum throwing buffoon. Phasma could have been the cold and calculating one.

Instead there is nobody threating (emo kid and holographic Snooki do not help) running things at the New Order, and thus there is no tension and I don't care what happens to them. Well, that's not totally correct. The Clone Rebels are even more incompetent, so the two actually are still threats to each other but not in a way that makes the movie good.

[The Romulan Republic]

Being cold and calculating, and wanting revenge, are not mutually exclusive.

Honestly, Phasma is almost a blank slate right now. All we really know about her (from the film at least, I understand she has a book now), is that she's a high-ranking First Order soldier, has some slight history with Finn and inadvertently prompted his defection, that she got made a fool of on Starkiller Base, and that she's smart enough or cowardly enough, depending on how you see it, to cut her losses and do what her captors say rather than dying for the cause. That's it.

[Abacus]

I think a lot of people put too much faith in JJ. The rebooted ST and sequals for SW were going to be a big hit no matter who directed the movies -- because fans *wanted* new movies. We wanted to know, finally and officially on the silver screen, what happens next. JJ went the safe route and reconstituted the plot of the OT to make TFA. He set the tone that SW wasn't going to be new, but rather simply regrow a new skin around an old body (plot).

To say that he is asked to return to write and direct IX is....horrifying in a way. If I felt that I could trust him to be more adventurous and risky, then I might approve. As for now, I'll wait to see what this coming December gives us in terms of Episode VIII.