Star Wars: The Last Jedi writer/director Rian Johnson promises fans that Episode VIII will feature the same traditional three-paragraph opening text crawl. Johnson can finally exhale a bit now that the first official footage from The Last Jedi has been unleashed in the form of a teaser trailer. Early reactions to a rough cut of The Last Jedi call the film "different" as compared to other entries in the Star Wars saga.
One particular area where The Last Jedi had potential to be different from the rest is the opening text crawl, the traditional three-paragraph intro about what's happened between the previous and current films. But The Last Jedi will pick up right where The Force Awakens left off, leaving fans to wonder just what the text crawl would even say in one paragraph, let alone three. But Johnson has confirmed that the opening of The Last Jedi will still have plenty to say.
Speaking to MTV about what to expect in The Last Jedi in terms of the opening text crawl, Johnson assured that there's still plenty to update viewers about the fallout from the events at the end of The Force Awakens. "Even if it picks up right where the last one left off, there's still a lot of unanswered questions about what the state of everything is," he told MTV's Josh Horowitz at Star Wars Celebration. "We were able to fill three paragraphs."
While The Last Jedi is expected to pick up from the end of The Force Awakens, when Rey (Daisy Ridley) meets Luke Skywalker on the planet Ahch-To with lightsaber in tow, there remain some unanswered questions from other climactic scenes. The status of Finn's health will be largely unknown, and there's room to explain how the likes of Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Captain Phasma (Gwendolyn Christie) escaped the destruction of Starkiller Base.
Based on Johnson's reaction to the questions about the opening text crawl, it was perhaps overly pessimistic to worry that The Last Jedi would contain a different opening text crawl in the first place. The new trilogy certainly wasn't going to make any radical stylistic changes to the format of the six films preceding it, and The Last Jedi does have more than enough to update about what happened after the climactic battle at Starkiller Base.
Even after the first three paragraphs roll off the screen and the film re-joins Rey and Luke's encounter, there's still plenty of unanswered questions about the beginning of the newest Star Wars trilogy. Rey's true parentage has yet to be revealed, it's unclear how Kylo Ren will develop from here, and Supreme Leader Snoke remains one of the trilogy's greatest mysteries. But fans can rest assured that Star Wars: The Last Jedi will will deliver the same traditional three-paragraph update that has been a part of Star Wars since the beginning.
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Source: MTV
