Dunadwarf April 30th 2014, 11:45 pm
Like other continuities (DC, Star Trek, etc.) that get rebooted, this doesn't mean much. All it means is that the EU will stop, which it should have after the New Jedi Order anyway. They kept repeating that epic's plotline two or three times, with less and less significance afterward.
I am disappointed that, of all things, they're keeping the mediocore-to-terrible Clone Wars timeline (don't know about Rebels yet) but not the amazing Zahn stuff. Of course I realized after the terrible CW movie (ugh) that the cartoon did NOT fit with the EU, so it really branched there.
I'm glad they're not going to try to fit this in with the EU, even the good stuff, nor trying to recreate it (even the Thrawn trilogy would not make for good movies...too long and intricate). I'm interested to see what they do to follow RotJ in a whole new direction. I remember reading "Heir to the Empire" when it was new in the early 90's and not liking it for being slow and complex (the same reason I now think it rocks), so to me this will be like seeing the story I had then been hoping for. I have several questions about this new storyline:
Will this be about mopping up the Empire? I've always rolled my eyes at the people who keep acting like RotJ tried to claim that the Empire was just...over. It never claims that at all, so saying that it makes no sense, oddly enough, MAKES NO SENSE! I hope VII doesn't try to say that, like a Chess game, the black team just...lost. That'd be unbelievable AND uninteresting.
Will this answer the unanswered questions from the prequels? I love Star Wars, but even I have to admit that, while the story wasn't bad in its fullness, the movies themselves did a HORRIBLE job of explaining itself. I love that the EU explained the gaps, but a movie that requires homework is still a failure (same reason I didn't like "Passion of the Christ").
Will we have new Sith? Even with just the cartoons, there's still a lot of complexity in the Force traditions, so there's lots of room to bring in new Sith, but it still requires explanation. I wonder if these movies will end up doing what others (not me) complained about with the EU...bring some lost threat from the past for our heroes to defeat.
Will they be stylistically similar to the previous 6 films? Like them or not, the prequels did at least feature, and therefore reinforce, many of the consistent features such as; the opening crawl, starting on a ship in space, "I've got a bad feeling", recurring musical leitmotifs & the musical finales, to name a few. I hope that, even being made by completely different people, they'll still feel like part of the same saga and not a tacked on reboot. To put it another way, if these movies don't gel with the first two trilogies at least as much as the reviled prequel trilogy did with the classic, it won't look good.
I like the writers (Abrams isn't a hack, but the idiots he has to writes his Trek movies and the Transformers movies sure are) and I'm optimistic about the new trilogy, but I hope this will be its own story and not just a bunch of pandering-to-the-noisy-anti-fans nonsense designed to be not-the-prequels at the cost of actual story.
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