To help contribute, here’s the only meme I’ve ever done, which I did in response to news that Abrams was working on a new ST movie. And after seeing how well the franchise is going with SNW and LD, I feel it’s even more appropriate.
I’ve hated him since Lost. Possibly even Alias. Stupid mystery box bullcrap, Yeah, some unresolved mystery is fine. Your entire show shouldn’t revolve around boatloads of them being insufficiently explained.
Honestly, just move away from it in the timeline. Legends canon has a a few thousand years to work with, and one of the funny bits about Star Wars is that even though the Old Republic and New Republic exist extremely far apart, the vibes and aesthetics are all fairly similar. And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?
JJ at least got this part, the problem is you have to add enough flavor to the story that it doesn’t feel like a complete rehash, which JJ failed at with TFA even if that was the closest the sequels got. No idea how Rian made it out of the pitch meeting, pretty clear he had no interest in making a SW movie, and basically just went “never mind all that” to TFA. And then JJ has to land the plane that was basically rebuilt into a railcar midair, and it went about as well as could be expected.
I don’t mind the Kelvin movies too much. Actively enjoy them for the most part. But JJ was definitely the worst part of those movies by far and I completely agree with the meme. You can feel the love of everyone bleeding through despite him, not because of him. So many people worked on those movies who were huge fans of Trek and then he has the nerve to openly talk about how he isn’t a fan of Star Trek.
Beyond is my favorite of the Kelvin movies and, what do you know, JJ didn’t direct it. Funny that.
I didn’t hate the Kelvin movies, aesthetically though they were trash in that they took a scifi franchise known for inspiring good UI design and expanded upon it with absolutely horrendous UI. Seriously the computers and interiors of those ships are so ugly it hurts.
Also, starfleet felt WAYYYYYYY too much like a military for me in those movies, there was no attempt to differentiate starfleet from a direct analog to the U.S. military and that just gives me that “kind of want to throw up” feeling every time I see it in star trek.
The part about the visuals of the ships is mostly opinion. I don’t think they’re that ugly.
I mean… there are a lot of differences that separate Starfleet from the US Military. That seems like a bit much. However the militaristic thing in general is completely explained in universe. It’s not just a “Oh, Starfleet is more of a military now!” thing. The Kelvin was rocking along, doing it’s typical stuff, and then suddenly a massive warship with unheard of weaponry shows up and proceeds to obliterate it, killing a massive amount of people and forcing over 800 other people to run for their lives. All in no time at all and within Federation borders. Prime Timeline Starfleet beefed up the military aspect after the Borg and only increased due to the Dominion. Makes a lot of sense to me that they’d step up the militaristic aspect in a universe where a random incursion within their own borders left them completely defenseless. Then 20ish years later, the fleet that was sitting at Earth and is responsible for Earths defense is completely wiped out in less than 10 minutes by that same ship. At that point it would be absolutely idiotic to not have Starfleet be more militaristic.
The man knows how to absolutely decimate a Starfleet vessel. I’m all for bringing him back if he’s just limited to 10 minutes of an unpowered ship tumbling in free fall towards a planet.
Strange New Worlds is much better modern Star Trek, but you can’t say JJ didn’t take advantage of the theatrical scale of things.
Oh absolutely. Visually those movies are stunning. Like yeah, you can argue about plot and what not all you want but the shots of Into Darkness of the Vengeance sliding across San Francisco? Absolutely fucking amazing. And that shot of the Enterprise on a death spiral through the sky before the camera stops and you see the Enterprise slowly rise through the clouds? I have goosebumps thinking about it. I’m gonna need to rewatch that scene again.
Beyond has one of my favorite ship destruction sequences in all of Star Trek. Just the glory of the Enterprise cruising through space before having its throat unceremoniously slit was… Honestly it was a gut punch. Then seeing the saucer section bashing through mountains before crashing to a stop? FUCK! Not to mention the follow-up scene of reactivating the thrusters and causing the saucer to flip over.
Honestly the visuals are a huge reason as to why I enjoy the movie so much.
I like this take. Use him like you’d use a stunt coordinator, or a pyrotechnics specialist. Have a complex action scene that needs to convey action, chaos, high-stakes, and fireballs, for 12 straight minutes? He’s your guy.
What’s annoying is that he’s good at pacing and creating intrigue. He just never knows how stick the landing without turning the plot into swiss cheese.
Jorge is a fantastically creative guy. He needs limitations on that creativity, but he is undeniably a foundation of ideas.
JJ Abrams mostly regurgitates without having any truly unique ideas. Anything unique he does have is either a subversion or an unfinished mystery concept that’s film student tier. Especially in Star Wars and Trek, he took a bunch of the most surface level aspects from the franchises and threw them in without really doing anything with them.
What’s even funnier is when he tells how he came up with his “mystery box” method. He tries to play it off as some kind of profound insightful story from his childhood about magic shops. But then he explains it as the magic shops would package the junk that didn’t sell into an unmarked “mystery box” to create intrigue which duped people into buying it. He outright admits he’s selling junk
I’ll add that this didn’t start with the SW prequel movies either. The various essays on the topic typically focus on The Phantom Menace to make this case (see: Red Letter Media); we do love to hate on that movie. But if you look to early drafts of the very first Star Wars movie script, it’s clear that it took a village to make it more than B-movie material. Also, the making-of stories are complete with every kind of move-making person improving and adding to our producer’s vision, right down to salvaging the whole mess in the editing room. It’s been a problem the entire time.
Now I wonder if THX-1138 and American Graffiti have similar war-stories behind them.
Basically, writing movies like running a 100% improvised DnD campaign. Which is to say it’s great, as long as your audience signed up for repeated intellectual kicks to the groin.
Yep. I liked them. Movie Trek has always been action anyways. He did some shit I really enjoyed honestly. Like Kirk being a rocker totally fucking fits.
They were very typical “J.J. Abram’s has no idea what a franchise is actually about”. He actually admitted not having seen any extra materials about the franchise before making the movies, and rehashed existing storylines because it’s safe.
JJ Abrams is loved by the studios for the very same reasons he’s dreaded by the fans.
It was so insulting for him to come out and say he isn’t a fan of the source material. Was it too much to ask to find someone who’s passionate about Star Trek? I know they’re out there.
It is, or at least was, a strangely popular thing n Hollywood for people working on franchises to claim they knew nothing about them. A kind of “too cool for all this” vanity they were trying to project.
Exactly! If he was not a fan of any of the 60 years of source material perhaps he should’ve stepped aside and let someone who cares about Star Trek contribute to it
Imo, instead of asking why he didn’t step aside, I think the fault is on the studio executives for wanting to go in that direction in the first place. They clearly wanted a different direction to classic Trek, otherwise JJ wouldn’t have been their choice.
the guy who directed rogue one and the andor tv series isnt much of a fan of star wars, and those are two of the most acclaimed star wars projects since disney bought star wars
Although I do really like both of those and would probably put them at the top of the current generation of SW, they feel much less like SW properties and a lot more like they’re wearing a SW skin. Which, you know, is fine since it’s actually good and doesn’t destroy the property. Even if you don’t like Andor, they’re still making a ton of just regular Star Wars shit.
JJ basically derailed Trek for those of us that actually like the type of thing Trek was doing for nearly a decade. Basically took until SNW to get an actual Trek show.
Star Wars is samurai movies with a skin on it. The whole thing is borrowed, in space. So it’s okay to have stories like Andor, Rogue One and Mando, etc because they mesh well with the general design of the universe.
Lower Decks is as far as Star Trek as it can be, and yet it fits very well in the universe. Because it respects itself and respect the source material.
JJ never respected the source material and the universe.
Pretty much. SW is a very “hero’s journey” story. Somewhere else in this thread, I posted this:
And although I would say that Andor is proof you can do cool things with a Star Wars background, at its heart SW is a conceptually fairly simple. Young person with the help of wise wizard and plucky band must master his powers to face down the evil tyrant. Now, is that the OG trilogy? Prequels? Sequels? LoTR? The Matrix?
That, but in a space samurai/western backdrop. Andor not only respects the canon, it explores it. Sure, it’s not telling a hero’s journey tale, but it’s grabbing a piece of existing canon and enhancing it if anything.
This is where JJ I think fucked up with the Trek canon.
I'd be happy if Rian Johnson got another chance with Star Wars. Brick, Brothers Bloom, Looper, and Knives Out were all great and at least personally The Last Jedi felt like it was trying to set up things to pay off in the next movie since he was originally slated to write and direct Episode 8 and 9.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but I certainly don’t share it. I literally hate every single thing about it. It is the most disappointed I have ever been leaving a movie.
I left it absolutely invigorated and optimistic for the franchise. I saw it had some flaws, with one sizeable one being that it should have ignored the cliffhanger in TFA and caught up 6-12 months later*; the OT (and less successfully, the PT) got to handwave a LOT of character development by simply letting life happen offscreen. Still, TLJ took a needlessly derivative setup from TFA and set the stage for a much more interesting Episode Nine than we got, and I utterly disagree that he didn't get or like Star Wars. Shit, Rian Johnson is the only one who was willing to SAY the words "Darth Sidious."
I thought he gave a thoughtful fan's perspective on what Star Wars needs to be to remain relevant, the theme of growing from failure being particularly well done for a big popcorn franchise. The scene with Rose's sister, the Yoda scene, the acting from Adam Driver after the throne room scene? All peak Star Wars IMHO. Then of course TROS came along and was so clumsy and petty in how it blew up Rian Johnson's new directions, and so generally messy, that it didn't even please the people who hated TLJ.
TFA was useful as a palate cleanser for the generation who rejected the PT, and it gave us a compelling new batch of heroes and villains (Snoke honestly being the least interesting as a character), but it didn't really DO much, and its worldbuilding was absolutely retrograde. TLJ was a needed course correction, but Disney not only recoiled from the backlash, but took all the wrong lessons from it even if it did need to affect the direction of Ep9. JJ was, in the end, very wrong for Star Wars, though if TFA was his only one, it might not have been so obvious.
*-Two others being the framing device of the "slow speed chase" and Finn's arc being such a minor step forward . A few tweaks to the technobabble or moving them to Crait earlier and having it be a bit more of a formidable facility could have helped the first one, and having Finn more explicitly trying to save Rey and Poe at the cost of the Resistance might have better highlighted the additional layer of growth RJ was thought he still needed.
I wouldn’t mind letting James Wan have a crack at a Star Trek film though. He made decent work of Aquaman and Malignant is basically already a Star Trek TNG type of plot.
I always wondered if there are different versions of individual Q in other universes or if there’s just one of each that exist in all of them simultaneously.
He dove right in and I think got the point. The only thing I don’t like about the JJ Abrams films are the aesthetics. It’s a funky mix of the original style, but “how it would have looked if TOS had money.” They should have made it look as hokey as the original, IMO. It’s fun watching through now and noticing how this material that doesn’t actually exist is totally just some plywood painted gray.
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