http://www.agonybooth.com/star-wars-the-force-awakens-2015-a-failed-review-51100
Makes me reconsider my opinions on TFA. JJ Abrams is the one director who might be destroying the art of cinema more than anyone else, even more than Michael Bay or Zack Snyder. I haven’t seen TFA in over a year, and only once, and now I’m uncertain if it would even hold up a second time. What I’m afraid of now is that Disney is going to treat this franchise far worse than George Lucas ever could. We live in the era of assembly-line cinematic universes where everything is middle of the road, no stakes needed, getting by just enough on nostalgia alone for commercial exploitation. Has there been any original movie in the last 10-15 years that had an impact in the public consciousness? No, there aren’t: they’re based on comic books, Harry Potter, YA trilogies, or some preexisting IP. This is the absolute worst decade in the history of film simply because there are no popular films that are not derivative in some form or another. The OT is being diluted piece by piece; it was bad enough in the 80s but each subsequent decade has exponentially built upon the other. By 2020 there will be twice as many films in the SW franchise than there were a decade ago. And I’m betting that there is not going to be even one that can measure up to ANH or ESB. It’s not two out of seven anymore: soon it will be two out of two hundred.
Excellent post general and I’ve been thinking this ever since Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012. I recanted my opinion for awhile between 2014 and 2015 after The Force Awakens trailer got me pretty hyped, and I bought into the idea of passing off Star Wars to a new generation of fans. Unfortunately everything you just described is what I disappointingly saw when I viewed The Force Awakens, and again to a lesser though more mundane extent last night when I watched Rogue One.
There will undoubtedly be a saturation of the market and eventually a precipitous decline in ALL things Star Wars, including the OT. The onus is on those of us who realize how priceless the original films are, to preserve them for posterity, keeping in mind what has happened in the history of motion pictures and literary works throughout the ages. The exploitative, derivative works will be discarded over time and no longer extant, but perhaps a hundred years from now when we are all dead and gone, people will once again appreciate the OOT as the timeless classics that they truly are.