Commence opening crawl:
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” So, based on the rules of Rousseau’s wisdom, if the new Star Wars movies were a fruit they might be poo flavoured.
At Las Vegas film conference, CinemaCon, Disney confirmed it will release a Star Wars film every northern-hemisphere summer (our winter time) beginning in 2015. According to the latest spate of reports, these annual installments to the (partially) revered space opera will include the next three ‘episodes’ in the Saga, as well as a series of spinoffs rumoured to focus on the back stories of Yoda, Boba Fett and Han Solo = excellent.
In January it was confirmed that J.J. Abrams will direct and produce Star Wars: Episode VII – the perfect choice being that he’s a super competent genre movies specialist and will handle the material with the fanboy respect it deserves. However, in lesser hands, the material – which gets treated like a spiritual text to some (i.e. literally thousands of Australians consider their religion ‘Jedi Knight’, according to Census results) – could reach Jar Jar Binks levels of terrible, especially if the turn around time is so hasty.
The biggest issue with these proposed annual increments is disposing of the slow build up of anticipation that the prolonged periods between the earlier movies helped to create. This is going to kill the tension. Anyway, now let us revisit the gritty realism that was filmmaking in 1983!
