Opinions: Star Wars VII and beyond

          When I first heard the news that Disney had bought Lucasfilm (and associated properties and films) and planned on releasing a 7^th Star Wars film by 2015, I was shocked and to be honest angry. As a fan of the original trilogy I thought back to the dark days of the prequel trilogy and the nasty after taste it left on my favourite film franchise. But the more I read about it and then digested the information my opinion has changed to a shyly optimistic one. The main problem with the prequel trilogy (in my opinion) was George Lucas had complete control and no one challenged him, which can work wonderfully with certain projects but didn’t in this case. I will admit though that Episode III (Revenge of the Sith) is my favourite of the prequels and my 3^rd favourite over all behind, Episode IV (A New Hope) my No. 2, Episode V (The Empire Strikes Back), my No 1. And in case you’re wondering Episode VI (Return of the Jedi) is my No. 4, Episode II (Attack of the Clones) is my No. 5 and you guessed it Episode 1 (The Phantom Menace).

Lil Orphan Annie

          Now you might see that I wasn’t a huge fan of the newer Star Wars films and while that’s true to a degree its not the whole truth. As a fan I was unbelievably excited when I heard of the Prequel trilogy and as most fans did it gave us hope that we would get to see more of the franchise we loved, what we got in The Phantom Menace though was a film we had to force ourselves to love, kind of like when you open a present you don’t really want but have to be nice and appreciate it as say thank you (admit it we all do it), its only now when we reflect on it we can admit its faults and downfalls. But we had two more films shot in the same manner and written in the same vein as the first to come so we had to love it, but luckily not all fans accepted the film just because it was a new Star Wars film and took to the internet (yes it existed back in 1999) to express their dissatisfaction with what they saw namely certain characters (Jar Jar), lack of character development (Qui Gon Jinn and Darth Maul), wooden dialogue (everyone’s guilty of this), convoluted over indulgent plot and Annie (ooh Jake Llyod you were better than this). And for the most part these issues were ignored (well except Jar Jar he was cut quicker than the 1^st blonde chick in a slasher film), but they were improved, the producers challenged George more on the 2^nd and 3^rd films after giving him free reign on the 1^st prequel and the result is they are much better films.

          Ok I could go on about the past but now to look to the future, or why I think Episode VII will be good. The 1^st reason is it’ll have a new director, one that isn’t George Lucas and when this happened before it resulted in the best Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back which is also widely regarded as one of, if not the best sequels ever. So that’s a plus.

Secondly George Lucas won’t have complete control over it as we saw when he is in charge on his own the ship veers towards the rocks (Episode I and II) but when he is challenged and put under pressure he does an amazing job (Episodes III to VI), so him suggesting certain plot points and picking certain creatures will ensure the newest film will match the tone and feel of the ones that have gone before.
And lastly why I think this will be good in general it opens up the franchise to more people and opens the opportunities’ to future Star Wars films set in the expanded universe to be made or completely new original ones that we could never imagine or get with George Lucas at the helm.

          Anyway that’s my two cents on the matter I hope you can see how passionate I am on the matter and try and see things from my point of view and please feel free to disagree with me if you want.