The Rey stuff is immediately after TFA but the crawl indicates the rest of the story is at least sometime later. A few months I would guess. The Rey stuff eventually catches up.
The New Republic has fallen. That takes more than a day or two.
I’m getting sick of hearing so much about how we got screwed out of Snoke’s backstory. So many Internet “articles” say that this was one of the major flaws of the movie. I call bullshit on that. Everyone is just so used to having the Star Wars story revealed and explained in the episodic movies that it doesn’t even occur to them that Disney/Lucasfilm is probably just setting up dozens of new movies, comics, books and TV series. We won’t be limited by the Episodes going forward. Disney, for all their faults, does not just let characters sit idly by, especially interesting ones that fans love. You don’t think Snoke’s backstory will actually be fleshed out in some future movie or cartoon series? Disney knows how to make money, and they know there’s more to be told about Snoke that will make them more money than if they had just given us a three-minute explanation in TLJ.
Then you’re missing the point. It wasn’t that everyone especially wanted Snoke to be a big character, it was Abram and Disney that were trying to make him a significant character. Everyone is pissed because every significant plot point set up by TFA was ignored in TLJ.
At what point did Disney and Abrams seem to be trying to make him a significant character? I don’t remember that happening.
I’m not missing any point at all. I understand that people want things the way they want things right now, and they didn’t get that with TLJ. And maybe Snoke *is *a cool character (“significant,” or maybe not to this story) with an amazing-as-hell backstory and rise to power. I’d rather see that in a longer form than have a five-minute blurb shoehorned into TLJ. He’s set up, Disney isn’t exactly known for letting interesting characters that fans love go to waste. They’re an extremely character-driven studio, and they’re showing an interest in doing more than episodic movie story telling. Snoke will get his day.
But why does everything have to be revealed in the next movie? “Can’t wait to find out what happens with XYZ in the next movie. Oh, we don’t? Well then it sucks.” It doesn’t. I think that’s sorta the point of this movie, to get people to stop thinking about the next episode. Not everything has to be explained in the episodes. Why can’t Snoke be back-burnered for a later movie? He’s a great character, but wasn’t necessary for this arc anymore, other than to have Kylo Ren kill him and take his place.
I remember when the cool thing about Star Wars was how much of the backstory it didn’t explain. Who was the Emperor? What were the Clone Wars? Why did Vader turn to the Dark Side? All questions raised and not answered by the original trilogy, and for twenty years, that was a bragging point for the franchise.
And, of course, a colossal embarrassment when they were finally explained.
This strikes me as very odd. I felt that Snoke was hardly a character at all in TFA. He was a plot device.
Of the top of my head, I can’t think of anything that I considered major that was ignored.
Yeah, for me, there’s a lot to be said for having things go unexplained. It can feel like there’s actually a bigger world here, one that is not perfectly set out in a Snoke: The Biography. I feel like for me, the unexplained can just be unexplained. It’s part of the set-up. For a lot of people, if it’s not explained, that means it’s a mystery that will eventually be resolved.
I feel like, if Jaws were released today, all you’d hear is complaints about how you hardly ever see the shark.
Who are his parents? What’s his motivation? 
To be clear, I understand curiosity and I don’t think back stories are necessarily bad or worthless, I just don’t find the lack of them troubling.
I think that for a lot of books and stories, the fact that you don’t know everything at the end is what makes them great, because you can fill in the rest with whatever your imagination likes. As others have commented, there was a lot of unexplained in the original trilogy and that allowed people imagine themselves in that world. Maybe they were Darth Vader? But now, who wants to be the young adult who whines all the time that we now know he was?
//i\
If I want agonizingly thorough detail on backstory, I’ll read The Brothers Karamazov.
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So a few people have already answered this for me, but my 2 cents -
What Luke has realized isn’t that the Jedi were wrong about what The Force IS, rather they’ve been wrong all this time about the right way to use it. Asking people to be emotionless automatons living exclusively to serve their religion is a recipe for failure. And when they do fail, they fail HARD.
And The Force is neither good nor evil, any more than water is good or evil. Give water to a thirsty man, you’ve done something right. Hold his head under water, you’ve done something wrong. CHOICES are good or evil. Rey and Ren are about to show us a new paradigm. Learn The Force - the WHOLE FORCE - and then learn to make good choices.
That’s my thought anyway.
Best explanation of why I loved the movie. They also took a chance with killing Luke. I think we all logically thought that Luke would be the hero again in the next film. Now the story is far more interesting. It seems like the fans who dislike TLJ are upset because this film tried something new and unexpected. I’ve also noticed a lot of prequel fans dislike the new trilogy, for whatever that’s worth.
It can’t possibly have been that long, IMO. The First Order already knew where the Resistance’s HQ was located since they’d had Starkiller Base aimed at it, so they’d want to launch their attack as soon as possible before they had a chance to evacuate.
On top of that, the Republic was essentially decapitated in a single blow. The capital was destroyed, and with it the Chancellor and probably the majority of the Senate. The Republic disestablished its fleet after the end of the last war, so the various kings and princes and other nations that make up the Republic are pretty much on their own. Most of the minor systems probably surrendered immediately after the First Order demanded it of them, and whatever major powers are left in the Core Worlds are probably just barely holding their own.
I’d guess that, at most, a week passes between the end of TFA and the end of TLJ.
So, a bit of a tangent, but here goes:
I hadn’t watched The Force Awakens or Rogue One prior to seeing The Last Jedi. While I thought The Last Jedi was generally ok, and certainly far superior to the prequels, I didn’t think it came close to the original trilogy in terms of cinematography, acting, or dialog. (Excluding a few really terrible bits from Luke in A New Hope, the acting and dialog in the original movies was pretty solid.) But, again, in general, I thought The Last Jedi was pretty enjoyable.
So the day after I saw the Last Jedi, I went ahead and watched the Force Awakens. Huge let-down. I was stunned at how inferior the film was, in my mind, to the Last Jedi. Everything about it felt rushed in terms of the plot and the sequence of scenes, overloaded with superfluous effects and “ooh ooh, look at this, look at this” moments that were the same stuff that made the prequels so annoying to me; paper-thin characters; overall, just horrifically disappointing. Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher were basically the only good parts to me.
THEN I watched Rogue One.
THAT, my friends, felt like a “true” Star Wars movie in the spirit of the original trilogy. Spectacularly cool world-building, a really visually-beautiful aesthetic that had moments that actually approached true visual art (the market with all kinds of exotic backdrops and those intriguing red-robed monks or whatever they were), and…RESTRAINT! Rogue One actually had RESTRAINT with the cinematography. There were numerous visually-spare but beautiful shots. Shots where I thought, “if this were Force Awakens or Last Jedi, there would be a million little spaceships zipping and zooming around in the background, or all sorts of weird looking CGI creatures hanging around who were clearly just there for the “look at this!” factor.” Instead we got some beautiful, beautiful shots, stuff that would have looked right at home in the new Blade Runner movie (which…while I thought the story was incoherent…the cinematography was stunning.) The characters were way more relatable and interesting. I just thought everything about Rogue One eclipsed either of the two latest “trilogy” movies.
Just one bloke’s opinion.
A week sounds about right, taking into consideration that the convoluted path indicated in Luke’s map in TFA suggests Rey actually had a long journey ahead of her. I might even allow two weeks. We kind of roll back a little before rejoining them, obviously, but enough time for the Resistance Base on D’Qar to be located and a First Order fleet to be gathered to attack.
When I see TLJ again I will keep this question in mind but my memory is that in TFA The New Republic was powerful but did not want to risk open war with the First Order, hence they were supporting the Resistance in an openly secret way.
The First Order did not have the power to risk open war with The Republic until Star Killer Base was on line. We basically saw their opening shot in the movie.
In the beginning of TLJ The Republic is now mostly gone. The Resistance is all that’s left. It just feels to me that takes more time than a few days or a week but who knows? Star Wars is more about melodrama than accuracy so maybe that was indeed the intent.
Maybe, instead of “backstory”, we should use “context”. In Ep 1-6 we learn that Palpatine and Vader kill everybody trained in The Force except for those who go into hiding. They are presented as the most powerful figures in the galaxy on the Dark Side.
So where the heck does Snoke come from and where was he during Ep 1-6? He appears to be as powerful (if not more so) than Palpatine so why wasn’t he challenging Palpatine for supremacy? His character is just dropped into the story to be The Big Bad Guy and his presence seems to contradict the over-arching story established in Ep 1-6. Now that he’s dead it looks like we won’t get any context for how he fits.
In Ep 4-6 we didn’t get much backstory on the emperor (Palpatine) but we didn’t need it because he didn’t invalidate anything that happened before.
This is an example of the disconnect between the writers and the hardcore fans.
The writers are NOT hardcore fans.
It’s entertaining to see the way fans create and elaborate their own intricate theories and mythology. They do it with a level of subtlety that I’m sure doesn’t even cross the minds of the writers.
The writers are not thinking deeply about the nature of the Force, or the Jedi order, or the fine details of the plot or characters. They don’t even know yet what direction they are going to take the franchise in future. Different writers come and go, and they make up everything on the fly as they go along.
They are trying to create some interesting characters, some good visuals and action sequences, and a few plot twists that will bring in big audiences and make a lot of money, without pissing off the hardcore fans too much.
These movies are not aimed at the hardcore fans, who can’t agree about anything anyway, and will always nitpick and find fault whatever the writers do. They are aimed at the general public who like and are familiar with Star Wars, but don’t really know or care too much about the finer details.
If the writers had thought a Snoke backstory would be entertaining, they would have made one up. But they probably felt it would be boring and distracting and they they had better things to do within the movie time limit, so they didn’t. They may change their minds later, but there are too many other new directions to go at the moment.