On January 25th, Walt Disney and Lucasfilm ended months of speculation by announcing that J.J. Abrams would direct the first new Star Wars movie since 2005’s Revenge of the Sith. Here’s our advice to the 46-year-old filmmaker on how to give the epic sci-fi franchise a new lease of life.

Abrams did a great job on the Star Trek universe. He breathed new life into a struggling franchise, and successfully restarted the series without alienating the die-hards. But Episode VII is not a do-over. George Lucas is allowing Abrams to take over the mantle of his universe, not repaint the entire mural. It’s how he takes the Star Wars universe forward that will, ultimately, decide how successful the new trilogy is.

 

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Mind-boggling special effects aren’t the cinematic coup de grace they once were. While the original Star Wars movies marked, for many, the birth of the modern, glossy blockbuster (and the prequel movies certainly didn’t suffer from a lack of visual imagination), great effects aren’t enough to carry a movie anymore. Luckily, Abrams is a canny director. His work on Star Trek, Super 8 and Cloverfield showed he knows the difference between using effects to support a story, and simply showing off.

 

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One of Star Wars’ hallmarks has been its… unique style of dialogue. But there’s a fine line between the adorable kitsch of the original movies (“I’d just as soon kiss a Wookie.” “I can arrange that!”) and the eye-wateringly awkward exchanges of the Prequel Trilogy (“I wish that I could just wish away my feelings”). Little Miss Sunshine and Toy Story 3 scribe Michael Arndt is on screenwriting duties for Episode VII, but Abrams needs to tread carefully. Do away with that clunky dialogue in its entirety and it simply won’t feel like a Star Wars movie anymore.

 

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Is there a more hated Star Wars character than Jar Jar Binks? Let’s leave the inevitable racial criticism leveled at the simplistic Gungan to one side and remind ourselves that, at the end of the day, he was unintelligible, rubbery, and just damn irritating. Characters need to exist in the new movie to add to the story, not to shift more toys.

 

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The Prequel Trilogy, for all its faults, did represent the first time that audiences had seen the Jedi actually kick ass – don’t forget that the original films had only an aged Obi-Wan Kenobi, an untrained Luke Skywalker, and a half-man-half-machine Darth Vader to show how awesome lightsabers could be. We need to be reminded why these weapons are one of the coolest movie inventions of all time.

 

Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd & TM. All Rights Reserved. Photo by Keith Hamshere

Few people would bet against all three new Star Wars films making it to the screen, which gives Abrams (and whoever directs the other two films) the chance to bring back the kind of cliffhanger that made the wait between Empire and Return of the Jedi so unbearable. Thanks to each subsequent movie ending at a rather tidy moment, we’ve not been on tenterhooks since.

 

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As mouth-watering as the prospect of a ghostly apparition of Ewan McGregor, or a back-from-the-dead Samuel L. Jackson might be, their inclusion will do little more than throw the series’ continuity off even further. Remember the backlash when Lucas replaced Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen at the end of Return of the Jedi? (Technically, this meant that McGregor should have filmed replacements for all Obi-Wan’s chats with Luke after kicking the bucket on the Death Star.) Don’t shoehorn in a bunch of clever cameos just because it seems like a cool idea.

 

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There are certain things that simply can’t be left out of a Star Wars movie. C-3PO and R2-D2 have been the galaxy’s narrators since the very beginning – Lucas borrowed the technique of having two everymen intersect the story at crucial moments from the characters of Tahei and Matashichi in Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 epic, The Hidden Fortress – and they should be made available to anchor the story once again.

 

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This was a Lucas experiment that fell flat on its Force-wielding face. The big man himself acknowledged this particular misstep by essentially abandoning the concept after it tanked in The Phantom Menace. Perhaps there’s a way to work this into the new movies, but it’s a risk that’s not worth taking.

 

Credit: Lucasfilm Ltd & TM. All Rights Reserved. Photo by Keith Hamshere

At the end of the day, Star Wars is pure, unadulterated, family fun. The temptation to ‘Do a Nolan’ and show the darker side of the universe might be cinematically appealing, but let’s not forget why we all loved the series so much in the first place. Heroes should be heroes, villains should be villains and the guy should get the girl – so long as she doesn’t end up being his sister.

 

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