When Disney purchased the rights to Star Wars and announced that a new trilogy of films would be created, there were naturally questions of who exactly the main villain would be. Return of the Jedi tied things up pretty neatly. The Emperor was dunked down a reactor shaft like a basketball, Anakin Skywalker came back to the light, and Luke Skywalker became a full fledged jedi. There was an entire galaxy full of possible threats to the new republic that would arise from the ashes of the Empire.
When the seventh movie came out, we were treated to the new threat to the galaxy: The Third Rei-- er... The First Order. Between the familiar ships such as TIE fighters and the usual stormtroopers, it didn't look all that different from the Empire. They even had another planet-destroying weapon in the Death Star Thr-- er... Starkiller Base. Questions naturally arose as to why this new group was not only called The First Order, but why the people fighting them were called The Resistance. With the New Republic in charge, The Resistance sounds more like people fighting underground using guerilla tactics instead of a centralized government with an army to defeat these usurpers. Granted, the New Republic's home planet was destroyed in the first third of the movie, but the group fighting The First Order was called The Resistance long before that.
With this new, Empire-esque group causing trouble around the galaxy, there were questions on how exactly they popped up. Planet-destroying weapons and millions of stormtroopers don't just come out of thin air. The answers were revealed in the new, imaginatively titled book, The Star Wars Book. The official Star Wars site showed an entry that went into detail on the rise of The First Order.
"While we know that the military might of the First Order was built up in the Unknown Regions by the escaping Imperial leadership in the decades after the Battle of Jakku, the First Order also had its start inside the New Republic. Agents of the First Order helped push for a stronger centralized role of the New Republic government, which in turn caused a political stalemate, forcing systems that fear losing control of their autonomy to break away from the New Republic — in a coalition called the First Order."
So basically the ideas of Separatists from the Prequel Trilogy combined with the look of the Empire.
Oh.
An entire galaxy of stories, not even counting the stories from the Legends universe that fans would have no problem being made canon such as the Thrawn stories and the Yuuzhan Vong, and Disney goes with a combo of the Separatists and the Empire. There's a reason that people bemoan the lack of fresh ideas in Disney's trilogy. Just based off of the look of The First Order, there could have been a creative storyline about fighting the remnants of the Empire that was slowly starting to reform. Or set the story several years after the events of Jedi, where the Rebellion is gaining ground on the Empire to the point where it's finally about to beat them. Just because Palpatine, Darth Vader and The Death Star II are gone doesn't mean that the rest of the Empire just folds. It controlled pretty much the entire galaxy. There have to be billions more stormtroopers, thousands of officers and governors, and tons of Star Destroyers and other ships all vying for control of the remains of the Empire. Make the movie about finally crushing the last of them.
It's not to say that the First Order is bad, or that the ideas behind them aren't a little interesting, but the reveal of their backstory just highlights the underlying problem that people have with the Sequel Trilogy. There isn't enough creativity. An evil order with a planet-destroying weapon and an army of stormtroopers is trying to crush The Resistance. We've seen three movies of that already. Now the book shows that their motivations aren't even unique.
Disney is the most powerful, talent-rich production company in the history of cinema. It's created some of the greatest films of all time. It could have done anything with this new evil. Instead it did more of the same. Here's hoping that the next film in 2023 has more to offer.
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