It has been roughly 5 years now, since the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Seeing where the new trilogy ended up, it’s hard to imagine it getting any better after that first movie.
It’s even more so difficult when you think about the pedestal it was placed on. Before Force Awakens came out, it was arguably the most anticipated movie of the century. Not only was it continuing a saga 32 years in the making, but it had to be able to pass the torch. Although the movie is played out much like A New Hope, many storylines were set in place for the trilogy. Although Star Wars novelist Alan Dean Foster is talking about one that didn’t make it into the movie.
Alan Dean Foster was a ghostwriter on the original novelization of Star Wars. He also wrote the first Star Wars novel to not be based any of the movies 1978, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, a prequel-era novel called The Approaching Storm and the novelization for The Force Awakens.
It was while on the Midnight’s Edge, talking about Star Wars that he revealed the scrapped storyline for Force Awakens.
Foster said:
“There were a couple of things in there, and a couple of things that happened subsequently that bothered me. I’m going to tell you one thing they made me take out because enough time has passed, I don’t think it matters. There was obviously the beginnings of a relationship between John Boyega’s character and Daisy Ridley’s character. I expected to see that developed further in Episode VIII [The Last Jedi], and zero happened with it.”
The Last Jedi threw a monkey wrench in the workings of the trilogy as a whole, by basically doing nothing while simultaneously changing enough to bring the whole thing down.
There was some obvious chemistry brewing in Force Awakens between Finn and Rey, but that was thrown out the window with Princess Leia in The Last Jedi. JJ Abrahams touched on it again some in The Rise of Skywalker, but overall just faded away.
Foster’s seemingly disdain for the new trilogy went further as he called out The Last Jedi for being a “terrible Star Wars movie.” However, he wrote a treatment for Episode IX which involved Rey having a partial droid brain as a way to explain how quickly she could pick up things, such as flying the Millennium Falcon. This sounds pretty horrible all things considered, so maybe he’s not the best judgment.
