[Paracelsus]

The colour thing doesn't bother me much at all, nor the casting of unknowns: Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford had been in about one film each before getting the nod for Episode IV, and it was Carrie Fisher's first major film role at all. Lucas's theory has always been to cast a bunch of relative unknowns so the audience doesn't project their other roles onto them, with a few well-known character actors backing the unknowns. The same went for (Christ Almighty) Episode 1: Liam Neeson was meant to be the "known backbone" of the cast, and Ian McDiarmid (arguably the best continuing asset of the entire series) has been in five out of the six.

My concern over the female thing will be the extent to which they turn her into a superhero. Luke in the original films was a developing action hero, he was a genuine farmboy at the beginning and slowly matured into a warrior across three films. Rey, the female protagonist, looks more like a retired female badass - what with things we've been seeing including rappelling off mechanical cliffs and apparently wielding a fucking metal bo as a weapon - which strikes me as wrong, wrong, wrong if they're going to make it a story about her growing into a Jedi or some shit like that. Should it come to pass that she starts abruptly using Force powers somewhere during the film without any prior indication that she knows how to use them, I will, as Prince Humperdink says, "Be very put out."