Sheo_Dagana said:
I'm not terribly interested in a new set of Star Wars movies, but it was pretty inevitable. I'm all for the original cast being in the movie, but yeah, cameos would be best. The ironic part about 'giving fans what they want' is that if they REALLY wanted to give Star Wars fans what they wanted they would just adapt the Thrawn trilogy into the new movie trilogy, but the prequels shit all over a lot of the extended universe anyway so I lost all hope where that was concerned a long time ago.
Though I think I enjoyed those while I was reading them, I didn't come away feeling like Zahn's books were even close to Episodes VII, VIII, and IX material. For one, the new characters in those books were simply awful. I don't remember much about the new villain Admiral Thrawn, except that he had blue skin and could somehow look at a civilization's great works of art and immediately discern the tactical weaknesses of said civilization's space military (i.e. yeah sure, okay...I guess artists and military strategists are two sides of the same coin). The insane Jedi clone was similarly tiresome and cartoonish, as was Luke's new foe/friend Mara Jade (especially when she would reiterate her promise to kill Luke again and again...).
Secondly, if I recall, none of the three Zahn books seem to end with much along the lines of a cliffhanger or series low-point. At the end of each book, the good guys get lucky at the points when all hope is lost, to the point where each book has the arc of an Inspector Gadget episode (with Thrawn flying off waving his fist like Dr. Claw).
What ultimately turned me off of the Expanded Universe was an idea that it wasn't 'expanded' at all. Even dozens of years after the Battle of Endor, the books were STILL piling on new adventures with the same half-dozen characters, none of whom could ever possibly be killed off (i.e. due to iron-clad rules by Lucasarts) and replaced by newer, younger characters. In some of the books, you could almost tell that the writers were struggling to work within these limitations, desperately squeezing the same old characters dry, only being able to kill off the EU characters (basically all red-shirts by default).
Time will tell how things will turn out but after seeing Star Trek: Into Darkness I have a feeling that Abrams will get too lost in the 'nostalgia' and fail to make an interesting movie. I just hope we won't have to see any way-to-choreographed, over-the-top lightsaber battles that we saw in the prequels.
I feel like that's an area where Abrams and co. will probably do a solid job. I didn't like the Star Trek reboots, but the one-on-one fight scenes in those films seemed to work pretty well. Even so, who knows what's going to happen. I'm assuming the studio will push to have more lightsaber acrobatics.