Star Wars: The Last Jedi - 9 Episode VII Problems It Must Avoid

Despite the worrying development of Toy Story 3 scribe Michael Arndt leaving The Force Awakens at an early stage, one thing Star Wars fans could be reassured by was that Lawrence Kasdan, writer of The Empire Strikes Back, was onboard. But, unfortunately, his involvement wasn't quite enough to prevent problems with the story.

Along with Poe's surviving the TIE Fighter crash being relegated to DLC for the Lego game, the biggest script-writing error in The Force Awakens was Starkiller Base, and not just because it's the Death Star on steroids. In A New Hope, the Death Star is a presence right from the opening crawl, and is the element driving the entire plot, while Starkiller Base only becomes part of Episode VII's story two-thirds of the way through, like a software patch to fix the problem of the film having no third act. And away from writing, the film's editing caused its own share of problems.

The Force Awakens originally introduced Leia earlier on, with a subplot of her sending an emissary to the New Republic to try and form an alliance against the First Order, which was cut during editing, and only survives with a few shots of a Resistance officer on Hosnian Prime when it is destroyed. Cutting that subplot removes any weight that the destruction of the Hosnian system has because it is never seen or mentioned before that scene, and only mentioned by name twice overall. In the final cut, it only exists to be destroyed, which means that there is no reason to care about it or anyone on it.

What The Last Jedi Should Do: Spend more time making sure that everything is coherent, and that the footage left on the editing room floor isn't important to the story.