Star Wars - does it have a future?

[Yonadav]

I think the Star Wars stories suffer from not really being able to escalate in any meaningful way. It's an evil empire that is willing to use weapons of mass destruction verses the Rebels who won't use weapons of mass destruction. So it's always a defensive battle against the impending use of mass destruction. That makes it one David and Goliath story after another.
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Sure, what made SW popular were special effects, people seeing stuff they haven't seen before on that scale. But today all those spaceships, robots and fights mean nothing to the audience and they rather focus on plot holes, poorly written characters, stupid dialogue...

I recently read a bunch of old Doc Smith stuff. His Skylark of Valeron was basically the deathstar built and operated by the good guys. Doc Smith was a pretty simple story teller. No complicated twists or turns. Pretty shallow characters. Very Star Wars like. He was interesting because his Lensman series and Skylark series kept escalating the power of the weapons they were creating. The protagonists would be up against a very powerful enemy who had gained some sort of technological advantage over them. And they would come up with a new weapon to overcome that advantage. You keep reading to see what Doc is going to come up with next. The weapons become more and more outrageous. In Skylark Duquesne, they attack and basically destroy an entire galaxy.

The Star Wars writers just don't know how to escalate things. They can't think of anything worse than the deathstar.