The next Star Wars trilogy may end up awesome or totally terrible, but at least the old crew is buying into the idea. Harrison Ford will return as Han Solo, even if he wants to die, and now it appears that Carrie Fisher is returning as Princess Leia. That's according to an interview Fisher did with Jennifer Pfaff of the Palm Beach Illustrated. It's a nice read, but it's the Leia parts that count.
And wow, they're kind of a doozie. Fisher envisions Leia as being "Elderly. She’s in an intergalactic old folks’ home." Oh, and she might be crazy enough to still wear the bikini: "The bagel buns and the bikini, because probably she has sundowners syndrome. At sundown, she thinks that she’s 20-something," she said. "And she puts it on and gets institutionalized."
Now, that all may be a bit of goofballery–aside from Fisher saying Leia's coming back, who knows how the rest fits in–but it does highlight one of the weird conundrums of the new trilogy: By the time the first new movie comes out, the Star Wars will be about four decades old. That wasn't an issue with the prequel trilogy, which used a new cast (and an absurd amount of CGI, ugh), but if Leia is back, it sounds like the next trilogy is going to rely pretty heavily on the original cast.
It's not so much of an issue that said cast is more advanced in their years–I'm sure Lucasfilms can CGI the walkers away–but it will be curious to see how they play the new roles. Leia in a bikini again is just referencing the glory of the past; it's not developing the character at all. And even if that's a joke, is the entire production going to be playing to its own legend?
The first trilogy worked because it came out of nowhere; look at any of the millions of interviews the cast has done since, and you get a sense of how much fun they all had with the first movies, which shows. But man, add in 40 years of fan expectations–as well as a cast whose characters are as self-mythologized as revered by fans–and I have to wonder how well the new trilogy will be able to crawl out from under its old shadow.