With Star Wars: The Last Jedi only weeks away, it's hard to believe we are already at the point of looking ahead to the trilogy's end. Wrapping things up with Episode IX is the same director who started it, J.J. Abrams, and if there was one complaint about his Star Wars: The Force Awakens it was the familiar story beats from the original trilogy.
Abrams and composer Michael Giacchino appeared on BBC Radio to talk about the film, and Abrams suggests it's a good time for the story to go in a new direction...
“I feel like we need to approach this with the same excitement that we had when we were kids, loving what these movies were. And at the same time, we have to take them places that they haven’t gone, and that’s sort of our responsibility. It’s a strange thing – Michael’s worked on things like ‘Planet of the Apes‘, ‘Star Trek‘ and ‘Star Wars,’ and these are the things of dreams. Yet we can’t just revel in that; we have to go elsewhere.”
Elsewhere is good. Abrams has talked about this before, and it was clear his mandate on 'The Force Awakens' was to make a movie that was both new and an homage. Now that he's done that, here's hoping Abrams can go in a truly unexpected direction.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens December 15th. Episode IX was recently moved to December 20th 2019.
