(...oh. I thought I posted this like 90 minutes ago but I got WARNING NEW REPLY. Well, posting as-is even if bits turn out to be redundant.)
So I was thinking of other directors who could pull it off -- Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi, Frank Oz, maybe Barry Sonnenfeld if he got his shit back together -- and it hit me: Guillermo del Toro.
I mean, feel free to keep throwing suggestions out, but I'm pretty sure I just won.
Anyway. Thoughts from a casual fan (seen all the movies, some of the cartoons, read some of the comics, played some of the games, never read any of the books or the like) on what it should be like:
Well, you gotta get Ford, Fisher, and Hamill onboard. Whatever it takes. A cut of the merchandising if they ask for it; give them what they want. They shouldn't be the main characters but they need to be in the thing.
And the thing is, that gives us a timeframe. Unless you pull some goofy Tron/X-Men 3 shit and try to make them look unconvincingly younger, you are looking at a Star Wars movie that takes place 30 years after Return of the Jedi. (Assuming normal, twenty-first-century human aging for our protagonists -- if you wanted you could throw in some mumbo-jumbo and make it still later. But I think that'd be a mistake.)
So what's happened in thirty years?
Well, rebuilding the Republic is going to be a much trickier damn task than Palpatine's hostile takeover. I'm thinking we're looking at a Wild West of warring fiefdoms. The Sith are still out there -- in fact they're higher-profile now than they were in the first six movies -- and while you can't expect the Sith to be a unified front, I expect they control different warring factions of what used to be the Empire.
Leia -- well, here's a conundrum. Presumably she'd have been the President of the New Republic when it formed, but thirty years later -- what? Has she followed her mother's example, accepted a term limit, and become a Senator or some other lower-ranking official? Or has she continued to hold the office of President/Chancellor/Whatever despite the rather uncomfortable fact that that would basically make her a new Empress? Would she hang onto power "for the greater good" despite discomfort with the idea of resembling the very dictatorship she overthrew, or would she step down and find herself subservient to a potentially weak and corrupt series of successors?
Luke -- he's basically rebuilding the Jedi Order from the damn ground up, and he's faced with the dilemma of deciding just how close the new Order will be to the Old, which, as we've already noted at some length, was basically worthless and decadent. (At the very least he should allow Jedi to marry, for God's sake.) There are bound to be other Jedi still out there, older than he is and more inclined toward the Old Ways.
And I see friction between him and his sister -- her wanting the Order to take a more active role in governance, as it did in their mother's time, and him wanting to stay apolitical. Presumably they'd be on the same page on taking out the Sith, but maybe not much else.
Han -- Han is Davos motherfucking Seaworth, except Stannis is his wife. (Ooh -- Benioff and Weiss would be another good choice to direct.)
But all that should just be a backdrop. The main characters should be original -- maybe Han and Leia's daughter I guess if that's the way you want to go, give a sense of continuity, but ideally mostly new characters with no ties to the old.
'Cept maybe the villain. I'm thinking Ahsoka Tano.
