Recently it was announced that J.J. Abrams would be directing the next Star Wars movie, due out in 2015 after George Lucas sold the keys to the kingdom to Disney for 400 billion quatloos or thereabouts.
Once people were done with all the lens flare jokes and reassured of at least the promise of a coherent story since Abrams wouldn’t be writing the script (I’m thinking here of his ‘every idea gets added to the plot’ approach to Super 8), speculation turned to what the actual story would be about. The least interesting approach for me is the most obvious–set the events roughly the same amount of time as has passed since Return of the Jedi (32 years by the time Episode VII rolls out), bring in as many of the old cast as possible and make it all about their kids. And it looks like both Harrison ‘Grandpa’ Ford and Carrie ‘drugs are bad’ Fisher are already signed, with Mark Hamill a distinct possibility so there’s a good chance this is exactly what the story will be.
This isn’t bad, per se. I’m a sucker for some good nostalgia so it will be nice to see the old characters, even if they more resemble Jabba the Hutt now than their 1983 selves, but with an entire universe to create new stories in and without being constrained by the nonsense of the prequels I am hoping for something a little fresher than ‘Luke has a kid and OMG he has the Force and will he be good or bad?’ plus space battles and several hands being lopped off along the way.
I guess we’ll find out in a few years.