At best he’s a safe pair of hands with franchises because he draws on their previously successful formulas that he tries to replicate without attempting to innovate. However, if his heart isn’t in it the wheels can very rapidly come off.
He seems better in TV (Alias, Fringe) or when producing other people’s projects (Cloverfield).
I'mma go out on a limb and admit that I posted this article knowing that I disagreed with the premise. JJ Abrams is incredibly talented - he proved that with Cloverfield and Super 8. Additionally, he took Star Trek into a new direction despite its challenges and he remains scandal free unlike some other scifi directors (looking at you Bryan Singer). So you can be angry about TFA or Fringe if you want, but the guy does quality work in an industry full of bad actors. Credit where credit is due.
Butchered? That’s an insane exaggeration or you’re being exceedingly dramatic. How did he possibly “Butcher” Star Trek? They were well received! They were widely acclaimed, they did the source material justice in many ways and brought Star Trek - a fandom that was dying to the times, back to a mainstream audience who embraced and engaged with it.
I seriously don’t get how you Sci-Fi fans have such incredibly lofty expectations. The things you want done in cinema to satisfy you simply cannot be achieved. You’d find fault no matter what was presented to you.
You have to understand that creative decisions need to be made to condense TV storylines that typically run for an entire season or volume of comics into 2 hours of screen time, including exposition, character development and world building. It won’t ever be the way you want it, but shitting on people who made those things come to life just means less of it. No one wanted to touch Star Wars after the Prequels. Everyone pissed all over Hayden Christensen’s acting, and now they embrace him like an old friend.
And Abrams didn’t ruin the final trilogy. He was attached to The force awakens which largely followed the same pattern as A New Hope (it was extremely well received at the time), then Rian Johnson turned up for the second, squatted over the franchise and took a massive Mr Whippy all over it, leaving it in an unsalvageable mess for Abrams to polish into a reasonably attractive turd.
@inkican, JJ is a hack who has connections. I'm so happy to finally find others who see it, too! That said... I honestly enjoy Super 8. Still, I'll include it's flaws any time I'm tearing his work apart.
I remember watching Fringe and being utterly underwhelmed by it. It introduced intriguing mysteries, with most of them being forgotten by the next episode. I think this is what J.J.Abrams has always been about. The same seemed true for The Lost. Although, I stopped watching it after about 3 episodes.
No, you got the nail on the head. He loves a mystery, and wants to keep audiences guessing about what’s in his “black box” but there’s never actually been anything there. Fringe, Lost, Star Wars, Star Trek, he’s just never been able to actually tell a story with an actual conclusion. If he absolutely has to be involved in a creative process, it should be for about 5 minutes at the beginning before he’s kicked out in favour of writers that can actually do something interesting with the incomplete messes he spews.
This is how he treated the Star Wars sequel trilogy. All McGuffin, no plan. People have planned better on bar napkins in a restaurant. I really wish Trevorrow's script would have been used instead of putting Abrams at the helm of Episode IX. Instead we got "Somehow Palpatine returned."
The pilot is great. And by fast, you mean episode 2. I think the pilot was the only episode I watched that I enjoyed. The rest of the series just feels like work.
Fringe was good when there were still mysteries about it, when you were never sure what was going on. It kind of dragged out in the later seasons and whatever they did with the Observers was just… whatever.
Force Awakens, despite its unoriginal plot, was also somewhat good when it came out because of all the unanswered questions and the potential it had. JJ Abrams seems good at sparking things and planting mysteries (“mystery box shows”), but not so great at actually answering those mysteries. Force Awakens didn’t really start to look bad until Last Jedi came out and everyone realized that there was no plan and nothing mattered, but that was more on Rian Johnson than JJ Abrams. Yes, Abrams/Disney should’ve had something worked out beforehand, but Johnson seemed to go out of his way to just shut the story down midway through a trilogy and left nothing to move forward with.
The problem is Abrams was never sure what was going on in Fringe, or any other project, either. The mystery of Fringe or Lost gets completely ruined by the fact that there isn’t a solution and never was.
I will forever be confused at how the most hated line from the sequel trilogy wasn’t “a good story for another time.” It was so classic Abrams in all the worst ways that I very nearly left the theater and I still feel a tinge of rage ever time I see that scene.
If anything, Abrams should just make trailers, I think that could actually be something he’d be really good at: driving up hype. He wouldn’t actually have to deliver on anything (which is where he falls apart), just set up a mystery (“Is this a good movie?”) and then he has nothing else to do with it.
This would actually be a brilliant use of his skillset. He very evidently doesn’t research anything about the source material or care what the film is about, which fits modern movie trailers perfectly.
I watched lost really late, but i also hardly knew anything about it. The beginning is so much fun, and then it turns more and more into a show where it feels like they have no idea what they want to do with that show.
'Ruined' is an odd thing to say. JJ made two deeply unoriginal Star Wars movies that failed to lead anywhere and his contributions to Star Trek showed he didn't understand Star Trek - and he certainly shouldn't be handed another franchise again. He doesn't really know how to tell an ongoing story with an evolving plot and how to develop characters over time.
But Star Wars and Star Trek haven't been 'ruined', they've recovered just fine since he left. The Mandalorian, Andor and Ahsoka have been excellent contributions to the Star Wars universe - Dave Filoni clearly has the original vision for where to take Star Wars that JJ lacked. Strange New Worlds and Picard season 3 have been Star Trek back to its 1990s best (the less said about Picard season 2, the better...), and again Terry Matalas could be a similar figure for Star Trek.
I don't like the language of 'such and such weak production RUINED my franchise' when we're talking about franchises that are thriving like never before.
I don’t know about star trek, but he completely overrode long standing lore and plot points in star wars. That being said, star wars was never good at that to begin with.
JJ ruined TLJ because basically everything people hate about TLJ was established in JJ's shitheap of an unoriginal "delightful" TFA
for that I will not forgive him. that movie is phenomenal. it's sad that as a result Filoni's circlejerking fanservice has taken the reigns of star wars and johnson's trilogy is on the backburner.
(he said he didn't "get" star wars as a kid and that when they were writing TFA they asked for every single page, "is this delightful?" fucking hack)
As bad as TFA is, the damage TLJ did wasn't warranted by episode 7. I don't know how Rian Johnson got a hold of a Star Wars movie but once he did, he was intent on unmaking everything SW built. TROS was as bad as it was because it was cobbled together from what TLJ had left behind.
I'd hardly call Luke's separation from the Force as being established in TFA. Sure, it was a possibility but the writing never set up the fact that he had lost his way. In fact, the end of TFA was much more hopeful than the mockery TLJ made the scene out to be.
I'll agree with that point - TFA was a paint-by-numbers clone of ANH, whereas TLJ did something original and different. I would have really liked to see how Rian Johnson would have closed out the trilogy.
TRoS is a really good example of JJ's inadequacy as a filmmaker - instead of building on the interesting things from TLJ and seeing where it concluded, JJ just scrapped it all and made a paint-by-numbers RotJ clone. He really had no original ideas.
Younger people might not care because they grew up with newer versions of the franchises, but those of us who grew up with the originals can absolutely say ‘ruined’ in context of the spirit of where they started. Putting our original dream team of Star Wars actors together decades later and then doing THAT with them is ruining what could have been a masterpiece swan song for the characters. Putting Spock in a fucking space fighter that incidentally ripped the exact same weapon and sound effects from Slave One in the SW prequels is just mind mindbogglingly stupid. Abrams always only cared about the Michael Bay wow factor and had no clue what made these franchises special to long time fans. He turned them both into dumb action movies with recycled plot lines and no heart. When I say ruined I don’t mean he ruined the franchises entirely, just the entries he had a hand in. Regardless of how well the franchises have survived and prospered, he still left an indelible stain in the minds of long time fans.
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