What Star Wars VII should have been

I thought The Force Awakens had some strong parts, like the attack on Death Star III and the engaging trio Rey/Poe/Finn. But it wasn’t the story I wanted to be told. I didn’t need to see A New Hope again. I would much rather have seen the original characters age and grow, and face new challenges.

Don’t show me Leia leading a rag-tag rebellion. Show me an ageing professional politician wrestling with the impossible demands of a thousand worlds.

Don’t show me Han working as a smuggler. Show me an old warrior bored out of his skull serving as Minister of Whatever, yearning for something else, anything else.

And throw in a Luke who after decades of devotion to the Force sees everything from every perspective all the time, to the point that he is barely even human any more.

Then have the New Republic face some hammer-blow of a challenge, where things go so badly wrong that these senior figures are inadvertently on the front lines, letting them have one last big adventure before the fight is taken up by younger hands.

That would have been a film worth watching.