What if The Force Awakens Script was filmed 1999?

We all know how Star Wars force Awakens completely demolished all box office records today...

Now what if the script was made in 1999?
Instead of the Prequels... We got to see what happened to Luke, Leia and Han with different actors playing Rey, Finn, Poe?

Would the fans back then be happy?

Who would have been your casting choices for the new leads back in 1999?
 
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First of all is Rey not Reyt(yeah meaning King in spanish too).

Ummm all my gut say....maybe, as this direct sequel and included back all fan favourites, of course a few characther will have different Characther Quids(Kylo would not be that emo or recursively he would invent the Emo trend,xd. Rey would be Closer a female obi-wan in the prequels that the thin veiled Katniss clone, Finn would be more in the center as protagonist.)

Ummm Samuel L Jackson as Finn? or Maybe Will Smith?(the later is a mega star and that would be the star power for the new gen). Natalie Portman easily can be Rey.... Maybe Ewan can be Poe?
 
How would it work? The current script is based on it being 30 years later, such as Kylo Ren's age. In 1999, it would be 14 years later, so Ren would end up being a pre-teen.
 
How would it work? The current script is based on it being 30 years later, such as Kylo Ren's age. In 1999, it would be 14 years later, so Ren would end up being a pre-teen.

Make Up people, that is what in movies, just some grey strings in hair and some convo how jaded was and pretty easily can be done.
 
Disclaimer: I haven't watched The Force Awakens, but I've read a lot of spoilers, plus endless social justice discussions of why there aren't any Rey action figures.

With that in mind, I doubt anything like this gets filmed in 1999. Explanations:

- The Thrawn trilogy, which until Lucas sold the rights to Disney the fans viewed as the canonical episodes 7-9, was written in the early 1990s. It could have been filmed in 1999-2005 based on Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher's ages then.

- Rey would not have been Rey. She's have been subjected to Trinity syndrome, in which the strong female deuterotagonist chokes and stops being useful in the male protag's grand battle. The canonical example is Trinity in the Matrix.

- Most fundamentally, in 1999, George Lucas didn't obviously suck. He'd already inflicted Greedo shooting first on us, but in the grand scheme of things, it's a minor issue. Every single person who liked the original trilogy would've swallowed every single change done in the remasters through the early 2000s to get rid just of Jar-Jar Binks. And the Phantom Menace is terrible in many ways apart from Jar-Jar. The result: an alt-ep 7 made in the 1990s would've been run by Lucas, with all the problems that implies. OTL's ep 7 basically copies the hero's journey structure of ep 4. Lucas rejected that structure for ep 1 in favor of telling a story of Anakin's moral fall, which would've been fine except for the fact that he was the person telling the story, and he's just not good enough at literary storytelling. Alfonso Cuaron could have made an amazing Star Wars movie, except he wasn't famous in 1999.
 
We again reduced to lucas bashing so fast? jeez i now understand why he sold this to the mice empire.

Ironically was Finn the one who suffered the Trinity Syndrome(Finn was always inteded to be the hero but got shaffled as they switch to Rey).

Thrawn trilogy was like eye of the mind,a very well regarded but still expanded universe novel, the EU worship just started after the weakness of both episode 1 and 2 were so divisive(not bad, have pretty good moments as bad ones) so start the infamous otl 'nerd rage'

Taking Basis otl EP vii(who was written by lucas before re edited twice, first by Episode V writer, later abhrams) and Otl Episode I i can imagine a middle point all characther, of course Finn(or equivalent) would be the hero all along but Rey would be still better regarded, maybe more developed
 
If it's basically the same film script as now but filmed in 99, I don't see it being considered nearly as much of a success.
Part of the reason for the popularity of The Force Awakens is because it's a return to the form of the Original Trilogy after what many (not myself) saw as the failure of the Prequels in the different path it took and the over mentioned hatred of certain characters and plots.
Without the sour taste in the mouths of some after the Prequels, and the three films creating a gap from the moments of the Originals, I imagine that the similarities between The Force Awakens and A New Hope would be even more obvious and probably much less appreciated.

It would still go down as a bigger success than The Phantom Menace, but I just don't see the acclaim reaching nearly the same heights.
Without the lessons learned from Prequels, the same mistakes they made might end up slipping in to filming too (slapstick and melodrama).
 
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One more thing: the love for constant reboots is pretty recent. I think it started with Batman Begins, but if I'm wrong, I'm only wrong by a few years. In 1999, the recent big flicks were original worlds: Independence Day and the Matrix were the two big ones. It's not like now, when studios are hesitant to throw big budgets at things that aren't based on preexisting intellectual property.

This is why ep 1 tried (and failed) to do something different from the original trilogy, and why ep 7 redid ep 4 but with stronger women and more minorities. Britannic Kingsguard is right that the same ep 7 script would not have fared well in 1999, because it was closer to the original trilogy, but I'll add that it would have been received even worse, because at the time, "we already saw that movie before" was a negative comment rather than a neutral one.
 
At that point also Return of the Jedi would only have been as old to moviegoers as The Matrix is to us now. And Jedi was itself seen as something of a remake of the original Star Wars. You would then have three of your four movies centered around destroying progressively larger Death Stars.

I think it would have been successful and it wouldn't have tarnished Lucas's image like the prequels did, but I don't think it would have gotten nearly the same level of praise. Instead there would be a decent amount of criticism, including people noting that the only really original sequel was directed by somebody else.

The WI universe I'd like to visit is the one where they filmed the Thrawn trilogy, to be honest.
 
At that point also Return of the Jedi would only have been as old to moviegoers as The Matrix is to us now. And Jedi was itself seen as something of a remake of the original Star Wars. You would then have three of your four movies centered around destroying progressively larger Death Stars.

I think it would have been successful and it wouldn't have tarnished Lucas's image like the prequels did, but I don't think it would have gotten nearly the same level of praise. Instead there would be a decent amount of criticism, including people noting that the only really original sequel was directed by somebody else.

The WI universe I'd like to visit is the one where they filmed the Thrawn trilogy, to be honest.

And Kyp Durron, the Jedi Academy trilogy , Exar Kun and Daala maybe. But no Yuzzahn Vong
 
You can surely have Lucas do a sequel trilogy instead of a prequel trilogy, but it won't bear any resemblance to what we're getting now. Force Awakens is very much rooted in the present. It's partly a reaction to the prequels and partly a reflection of current trends... and of course, Lucas had no hand in it. It's not something that can exist in '99.

I don't think Thrawn would be adapted, either. Well-regarded or not, Lucas has never thought much of the expanded universe, and I doubt he'd want to outright adapt it. Any sequel trilogy would be wholly original-- maybe pilfering some details from the EU, but little else.
 
We again reduced to lucas bashing so fast? jeez i now understand why he sold this to the mice empire.

Ironically was Finn the one who suffered the Trinity Syndrome(Finn was always inteded to be the hero but got shaffled as they switch to Rey).

Thrawn trilogy was like eye of the mind,a very well regarded but still expanded universe novel, the EU worship just started after the weakness of both episode 1 and 2 were so divisive(not bad, have pretty good moments as bad ones) so start the infamous otl 'nerd rage'

Taking Basis otl EP vii(who was written by lucas before re edited twice, first by Episode V writer, later abhrams) and Otl Episode I i can imagine a middle point all characther, of course Finn(or equivalent) would be the hero all along but Rey would be still better regarded, maybe more developed
Trinity Syndrome is specifically female. This is called balancing the scales.
 
If George Lucas directs it, the film will still suffer from wooden acting, excessive CGI, political scenes, and lack of character development. The script could be great, but the film terrible with him behind it.
 
Whether its sequel or prequel the problem is by 1999 there's no one in a position to say no to any of Lucas' ideas. There was simply no filtering of the good ideas from the bad. Your still going to get a mish-mash of whatever seemed cool/funny to Lucas on a particular day makings it way to the screen with pretty much the same results as the OTL prequels.
 
I don't know, I feel like if Hamill, Ford and Fisher were involved, they would challenge Lucas on some things. It's fairly well known that they would self-edit their lines to be more natural, and they certainly have the standing to challenge Lucas. Getting Fisher on-board earlier could be a real boon, since she was doing work as a script doctor at the time.

Of course, the problems with the prequels go deeper than just the scripts, and this wouldn't solve everything. But a more polished script would keep them from being entirely dismissed, I think, and it would be the same situation here.
 

CalBear

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Lucas would have made the exact same sort of film as he did with the prequels. He made movies for 12 year old boys, the original trilogy and the prequels are the same in that manner.

The prequels seem so bad for those who cut their teeth on the originals is simply because they are no longer 12 years old and expected actual dialogue that works, a bit of chemistry between the romantic leads, and a decent story arc. The audience grew up. Lucas' vision didn't.
 
I'd also like to add that, objectively, the prequels had so much more to them than the new movie, and people still hated them. They had new music, new aliens, new planet biomes, new spaceships, a whole new direction of battle droids as mooks and characters, it had the goddamn pod races...

...the new movie has nothing new in it. No new music themes, scant few new designs, similar looking sets, similar animations, and a weird pacing to the script that made it feel like everything happened in one afternoon once they left Jakku. The one attempt to have proper character development and meaningful conversation was every bit as bad as the Anakin/Padme story arc, and this despite some really accomplished actors doing the lines.

So in all honesty I don't think that releasing Force Awakens in 1999 would have been positively received. The people wouldn't be starved for nostalgia and accept an unimaginative reboot because they remember the prequels as being terrible. They would be comparing it directly to the original movies and asking, "why did this have to be made".
 
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