Sunday, August 16, 2015

Star Wars 9 Director announced, before 7 is even released.

So today, Disney announced that the director of Star Wars Episode 9 is to be Colin Trevorrow, who wrote and directed Jurassic World.

Err, excuse me?  We haven't had Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens yet.  That's not due to come out in the UK and Ireland until 18th December.  But this is the way that Disney are doing this, like one long production line of Star Wars films.

Even as the finishing touches are being put on The Force Awakens, they are already filming Rogue One, which is the first film in a new Star Wars Anthology series of films, a film that was written by John Knoll, who is a Visual Effects guru at ILM.  He's even down as an Executive Producer for this film.  Yep, an Executive Producer.  I hope that the film isn't just one long stream of visual effects shots with a minimalist plot to kind of make sense of all the various special effects.  That film is due out next year.

Then there's Episode 8, which is due out on 26th May 2017, 40 years and 1 day after the release of the original Star Wars movie.  That has yet to start filming, but Rian Johnson has previously been announced as the director for that film.  Knowing how long the prequels were in Post-Production with all the computer effects, that one should be shooting soon.

It does feel like a production line has been put in place for these movies and that worries me, because even the prequels felt like they had plenty of time to polish it, and a lot of care taken to make it as good as it could be, even though critical reaction to them has been mostly negative, though I liked them, but they weren't as good as the original trilogy, but that wasn't down to the technology.  The stories were a little bit weaker, and the characters didn't seem to have as much depth as before, even though some of them were actually the same characters as in the original trilogy, but in some cases, that would be understandable, especially for Anakin Skywalker in Episode 1 who was just a 9 year old kid.

I must admit though that with The Force Awakens in December, and Spectre in October, this is the first time that I have truly looked forward to movies coming out, and actually considering going to the cinema to see them, rather than my previous pattern since about 1995, which was waiting for it to comer out on home video and later DVD.  Hopefully, I won't be disappointed.