I think Scalzi nails it on all levels here.
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All Right, Fine, Here’s What I Think About JJ Abrams Directing Star Wars Episode VII – Whatever
It’ll be fine. Really. One, JJ Abrams is a perfectly decent director, who does a decent job with human beings, which is more than you can say about the last dude who directed a Star Wars film. Two, as…
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There is certainly nobody who has watched Star Wars that understands it less than Lucas did the last three tries.
I'm very worried that the characters are going to be mishandled. I don't want the equivalent of a Spock/Uhura romance showing up here. And if the new movie is in some alternate timeline, just forget it!
+Scott Randel The series is in a complete shambles already. At this point, I can't get scared of another disaster… it's as good as dead already.
A good handling can salvage some of Loony Lucas' phenomenal blunders, but a bad handling will just be an affirmation that the original series was all there was worth having.
Better off just forgetting the prequels existed, and hoping they do some justice to a post-RotJ film. I can think of some good E-canon lines, but I doubt Disney would feel a need to conform to them.
I'd rather not see a reboot — but here's plenty of stuff that continue or explore the SW universe that doesn't have to stomp on canon.
They can stomp on the prequel all they want.
And I want a blu-ray of the Starwars that I used to know:
'The Star Wars That I Used To Know' – Gotye 'Somebody That I Used To Know' Parody
I don't want a reboot.
I want Carrie and Harrison and Mark 40 years later.
(BTW, there's another war to fight 40 years later in the canon-verse…how convenient, huh? Use that backdrop to introduce the 'reboot-equivalents' to the Star Trek young cast.)
Canon has made it quite clear that the Galactic Empire was very successful in its historical purges. Seeing as how by the end of RotJ there are few people remaining who would force Luke to learn about midichlorians (for instance), you can just as easily never mention them in any movie going forward. Likewise with a lot of other prequel-content. Not a reboot, but similarly independent.
+Andreas Geisler I'm still looking forward to a new movie, just much less so than before the director was announced.
+Jonathon Barton I would like to see Jacen, Jaina, Anakin, Tenel Ka, and the rest of the EU recurring characters. It would be a shame to miss the stories of them when they were kids training to be Jedi, though.
I'm not in the least conflicted about this: I'm again' it. Why were remakes of The Day The Earth Stood Still and War Of The Worlds made? Same question for Star Wars. The original movies were fine – go make new movies.
Now to contradict my own point, I do enjoy various interpretations of Batman and Sherlock Holmes, but Scalzi specifically disallowed that. So why are we going here, again?
Again, my understanding is that this is not a Star Trek style reboot / remake, but additional movies putatively in the same series. I'm much more sanguine about the latter than the former.
I'm frankly excited. I was an Episode I-III hater. Not so much because of the more ridiculous excesses (midiclorians, Jar-Jar, poop jokes, terrible love scenes) … but primarily because they just weren't fun enough. J.J. Abrams is good at fun. I look forward to stuffing my face with popcorn in a roomful of people happy to be cheering about Star Wars again.
Eps. 1-3 were too serious (another way of saying "just weren't fun enough," I guess), full of unlikeable characters who did monumentally stupid things. But not monumental or epic enough — any grandeur (and it was there) was ruined by sidekick comic relief (e.g., Jar-Jar, Threepio).
Lucas couldn't figure out if he were writing grand historical fiction, a comic kiddy's show, or zip-bam-boom space opera … and ended up dropping all the balls on the floor.
Eps I-III didn’t “feel like” Star Wars to me. There was something fundamentally different about the prequels. They didn’t capture the “space opera” feel of the original trilogy.
@Avo – 4-6 were personal tales, when you got down to it — Luke’s journey, as well as Leia and Han’s. 1-3 were more intentionally epic in tone, hampered by some execrable direction and acting, muddied by trying to be as whiz-bang in FX just to show off how they could, and ultimately with the goal of filling in a backstory rather than telling a good story in and of itself. It was different — and a miss — in so many ways.