It's May the 4th, so it seemed only apt I did something about this.
The nerdiverse worked itself into a minor frenzy last week with the news that the new Star Wars trilogy has been cast.
To the shock of nobody (except the touchingly optimistic - and typically ignored - Dave Prowse) the original stars were anounced to be returning.
Call me cynical, but I wasn't that surprised to hear that Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher had signed on for huge paycheques in their first cinema release in years. Even Harrison Ford's career has been on the rocks (or crystal skulls) of late.
Perhaps the best bit of not-news to come out of the anouncement was the Independent, who insightfully pointed out that Ford would be playing "an older version" of Han Solo.
You read it here first, folks. Harrison Ford is not an immortal necromancer and ages in real time.
I'm calling this one right now: The new films are going to suck.
The biggest problem is that the original Star Wars movies went to great lengths to create a believably vast galaxy populated by untold numbers of people and alien creatures of all stripes, and the new films are going to honour that legacy by continuing to focus on the same half dozen characters.
Never mind that the stories about these characters have been told - their arcs are over and there's nothing more that can be written organically. That's not stopping the money-men, however, who will be shoe-horning aged characters into new stories for the sake of the nostalgic geek dollar.
As pointed out by Rich Dursley of thedurs.com, another crippling flaw with all things Star Wars is that for years now, every game and story has to feature the Jedi who, when all is said and done, are some of the most boring protagonists imaginable. They are supposed to be almost immune to emotion, which doesn't make for very compelling characters. There's a reason Dirty Harry wouldn't have worked as a Shaolin monk - flawed characters are inherently more interesting.
As the plot hasn't been anounced yet, me and Durs spent some time playing "How could they possibly make the new films interesting using the old characters without it feeling samey?" My preferred method would be to go with a religious/political analogy.
In the wake of the collapse of the Empire, Luke Skywalker has attempted to reform the Jedi, allowing them to marry etc, in the hopes of avoiding the kind of repression and frustration amongst the Jedi that eventually drove his father over the brink. This would mean we could have Mark Hamill in a prominent role as some sort of Jedi Pope* without making him do a lot of action scenes that he looks way too saggy for.
Conflict comes in the form of a splinter group of hard-line Jedi who disagree with the reforms and want to see the order restored to its roots. Think Mel Gibson's crazy brand of Catholicism that wants to repeal the second Vatican Council, or, more obviously, fanatical Muslims like the Taliban. These militant Jedi begin waging a terrorist war against the now-largely-peaceful galaxy.
I'm not sure if this arc is going to stretch to three movies, but it's the best idea I have to make the films work. I also really like the idea of Han Solo and Chewie going out in a blaze of glory by 9/11-ing the Millenium Falcon into the enemy stronghold. There's something very appealing to me about seeing the all-American, cowboyesque Solo using Al Qaeda tactics, and it would finally get Harrison Ford his wish of killing off the character, something he was pushing for as early as "Empire Strikes Back." Although it wouldn't surprise me if he was a little less willing to kill the character off now that his box office mojo is on the wane.
In reality, I suspect the films won't do anything like this. I have a depressing gut feeling that they're going to have some more cartoon baddies for everyone to fight, and the whole thing will sell a bunch of toys, make billions, and put another nail in the coffin of interesting movies.
I hope I'm wrong.
*Anyone with any sense has just stopped reading and started work on their own Jedi Pope script.
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