Tom Lamont, Observer writer

Do we need another Star Wars trilogy? Oh, definitely. As a gesture from Lucasfilm, to help rinse off the memory of the last trilogy. Dress up a troupe of amateurs in dressing gowns and bin liners and have them swing poster-tubes at each other for 300 minutes and still it would be hard to outdo the wretchedness of those movies (released in 1999, 2002 and 2005). With JJ Abrams at the helm of a newly commissioned Star Wars trilogy (Abrams' cast was announced this week), the next three should be a good degree better.

I ought to make it clear that I'm a Star Wars admirer, not a dress-up-as-Billy-Dee-Williams-and-argue-about-the potential-real-world-value-of-Alderaan-currency obsessive. I didn't grow up watching George Lucas's original films with any sort of holy observance; I just enjoyed their semi-regular showings on weekend telly. And I didn't consider Lucas's muffing of the second trilogy traumatic, unlike some; I only felt, as must have anyone with a fondness for blockbusters, that the new work was complacent, badly cast, and wasteful of the enormous audience goodwill that existed at the time of its release.

Goodwill, by the way, that's still out there. Abrams showed nerve when he took on Star Trek, a perishing franchise that he rebooted in 2009 with doses of adrenaline and an insistence on respect that pleased newcomers and loyalists together. I'm excited to see his take on Star Wars.

Guy Lodge, Observer film writer

I'm with you on the wretchedness of the last three Star Wars films – or the first three, as Lucas's half-hearted renumbering of the series would have us refer to them. (Does anyone besides Lucas himself go around referring to the 1977 original as "Episode IV"?) But that seems to me a reason to let things lie, rather than attempt to repair the damage. Left alone, the unwelcome additions could just fade into oblivion, while following them – successfully or otherwise – will forever draw attention to how Lucas botched his own creation.

At least it was his own party to spoil. Abrams' films are unlikely to be as soupily misguided; he's a director who specialises in stainless-steel proficiency, and he's secured himself a cast of alert, unusual young talents. (I feel obliged to blandly say how "happy" I am for Domhnall Gleeson and John Boyega, from a career standpoint, though I'd rather see them in any number of other things.) But I'm not sure Abrams, or anyone else, can bring much inspiration to proceedings while playing in what is by now a pretty regulated story world. His Star Trek reboot was brisk and entertaining, but still nostalgia with a fresh sheen; that impersonality was even more evident in its sequel, Star Trek into Darkness.

Abrams is a no-nonsense craftsman, which is why he can slide so easily between film franchises. But the first Star Wars films were kissed by nonsense, by palpable love of their own silly mythology. Is Abrams invested enough? Isn't switching from Star Trek to Star Wars a little like playing for both Blur and Oasis, anyway? Should we be encouraging the resurrection of any franchise, really, with original screenplays an ever-dwindling novelty in Hollywood blockbusters? I can't help thinking "the new Star Wars" should be, well, nothing to do with Star Wars.

TL It used to be that only Police Academy movies and straight-to-video comedies about extraordinary dogs were eked out to seventh, eighth, ninth instalments... Now it is standard for studios to think half a dozen sequels ahead. Even further. The head of Marvel Studios has a poster on his office wall that maps out 14 years' worth of linked superhero films. Up to 2028! We live in the age of the franchise: superpowered beings throwing each other into buildings make reliable money in America and Asia, the markets that matter to Hollywood. Franchises aren't going away.

Still, there are advantages. You make it sound as if large franchises stifle creativity, but that's not always the case. Writers, directors, even casting teams have felt emboldened by the fact that any one film in a larger package needn't be make or break. Risks are taken. Last year's Iron Man 3 surprised and delighted with its treatment of the central baddie – played by Sir Ben Kingsley and revealed, deep in, as a ludicrous comic sop. The second Hunger Games, confident of its earning power after a successful first episode, was a genre-pivoting triumph, mashing candid Paul Greengrass-ish violence into a cosy adventure yarn.

There are promising signs that Star Wars – renewed, and with little to lose in terms of credibility after The Phantom Menace and the rest – will loosen up once more, and aim for some of the playfulness that made the 1977 original so enjoyable. Unorthodox choices have been made already. Abrams, co-writer as well as director, has a history of prodding his audiences into weird responses at weird times (see the wicked comic touch with which he killed off his main villain in Mission: Impossible III). And two of the new cast, Oscar Isaac and Adam Driver, were last seen together in Inside Llewyn Davies, an eccentric Coen brothers comedy.

GL Abrams certainly knows his way around a serial – it's why his punchiest work to date has been for TV. (Yes, Lost crapped out on us a little, but Alias never did.) And with the notion taking flight that American telly is outstripping its cinema, maybe that's why the film industry is increasingly emulating small-screen storytelling structures. Come to think of it, I might be more open to reviving Star Wars as a drama series on a Game of Thrones budget that would force more emphasis on narrative than large-scale visual gimmicks.

I can't agree that franchise extension necessarily allows for experimentation, though – I find that mid-series surprises tend to come down to fresh directorial influence. Alfonso Cuarón gave the Harry Potter series an aesthetic and atmospheric lift three films in, but the last four David Yates-directed ones? They were utterly, competently indistinguishable, which made the enterprise drag even before the final-chapter bisection that all the cool kids are doing these days.

The second Hunger Games film certainly stood with a swagger granted by success, but it also benefited from a more visually and tonally daring hand at the helm.

Even the first three Star Wars films, unified as they were by Lucas's imagination, were kept limber by the subtle creative intervention of a different director each time. (Meanwhile, the three films we both wish to forget were uniformly Lucas-directed.) Abrams appears only to have formally committed to Episode VII, but it's the prospect of two further films of equivalent lineage that feels so oppressive to me.

TL Why did you have to bring up the idea of a Star Wars / Game of Thrones hybrid? Now I want to see that more than these new Abrams films... Imagine it: public executions by lightsabre. Recreational Ewok hunting. Liberal use of the f-word among Jedis. Though I dread to think what they'd cook up for Skywalker siblings Luke and Leia.

GL Well, series mash-ups may just be the way to keep things fresh. After four decades of Star Wars, we can only hope this franchise has three films' worth of exploration left in it. Lucas's creation, cobbled together from forgotten comics and stray offcuts of B-level Hollywood sci-fi, was never that deep to begin with; I'm not convinced it was built to be the saga its popularity, and its master's idle vanity, has forced it to become.

If the story runs into a wall, it will take more than a second-film Ben Kingsley cameo, or even a beardy invasion of Lannisters ("Stark Wars", anyone?) to keep me interested.