I had the same sort of "well, I might as well see it before too long" feeling (even if it was strangely refreshing and perhaps even a little productivity-enhancing being very judicious about what online sites I was looking at beforehand), although I managed to hold off until Wednesday. That let me get back to the little home town theatre where I first saw Star Wars itself (I was young enough then to barely remember the experience) and The Phantom Menace (it was a considerable relief to like it a lot more than the first overreactions had it.)
Anyway, I can see the point of "it's a good time at the movies" (although I'm halfway tempted to suppose there's a big slice of the general audience that enjoyed "the prequels" as much in pretty much the same way), and in some undefinable way the actual experience of The Force Awakens didn't seem as implacably opposed to "saga appreciation" as I'd feared it would. By the end of Wednesday, though (and I only saw the movie in the afternoon), before I read the spoiler reaction thread on the Prequel Appreciation Society site, I had a deflated sort of feeling thinking back to its not-as-deft version of the original Star Wars (no matter how many snappy one-liners Finn and Han were tossing at each other in a "we can write clever dialogue" sort of way) that could have had something to do with that "just looking at the original trilogy" viewpoint you mentioned. In a way, I can kind of feel sorry for those fans devoted to the previous novels. When they got around to "this is so much better than the new movies" I put the novels behind myself, but the story they valued has been brushed off... for something not that much different.
I have heard George Lucas started getting ideas for a "sequel trilogy" while working on the Clone Wars animated series, and that when he hit some snags getting started on it himself he shrugged and sold Lucasfilm, whereupon those ideas were abandoned for something "safer." I can wonder if they'd have been a more interesting, and perhaps even more positive-to-start-with "synthesis" of the previous "thesis" and "antithesis," but in a way those hypothetical ideas can be anything we want them to be...
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Anyway, I can see the point of "it's a good time at the movies" (although I'm halfway tempted to suppose there's a big slice of the general audience that enjoyed "the prequels" as much in pretty much the same way), and in some undefinable way the actual experience of The Force Awakens didn't seem as implacably opposed to "saga appreciation" as I'd feared it would. By the end of Wednesday, though (and I only saw the movie in the afternoon), before I read the spoiler reaction thread on the Prequel Appreciation Society site, I had a deflated sort of feeling thinking back to its not-as-deft version of the original Star Wars (no matter how many snappy one-liners Finn and Han were tossing at each other in a "we can write clever dialogue" sort of way) that could have had something to do with that "just looking at the original trilogy" viewpoint you mentioned. In a way, I can kind of feel sorry for those fans devoted to the previous novels. When they got around to "this is so much better than the new movies" I put the novels behind myself, but the story they valued has been brushed off... for something not that much different.
I have heard George Lucas started getting ideas for a "sequel trilogy" while working on the Clone Wars animated series, and that when he hit some snags getting started on it himself he shrugged and sold Lucasfilm, whereupon those ideas were abandoned for something "safer." I can wonder if they'd have been a more interesting, and perhaps even more positive-to-start-with "synthesis" of the previous "thesis" and "antithesis," but in a way those hypothetical ideas can be anything we want them to be...