ufoclub said:

lrn36 said:

I don't get how people keep thinking Abrams is going buck the trend and bring the final film home. This guy is not a newcomer with a wealth of potential. He's been writing mediocre scripts like Regarding Henry, Gone Fishin', and Armogeddon since the 90s. He was writing, producing, and directing tv shows the late 90s with Felicity. The last 15 years are littered with tv shows he lent his name to made, but had little involvement over the course of the series. His feature directorial debut was Mission impossible III in 2006. He's been in the game for over 20s years is almost 50 years old and he is still an unoriginal hack. A very successful hack ,but that shows the declining quality of mainstream moviemaking.

His directing style is derivative of Michael Bay with lots of camera swoops, saturated colors, and fast cutting to bombard the audience with imagery and noise so they don't notice the lack of plot. He just hit the geek audience and Bay is all about hot women, guns, military, America, fast cars, and sunsets. He wrote Armogeddon for Bay and they been great friends ever since.

I have greater respect for Bay because he, at least invented that style. And the movies he makes are really the movies that fit his tastes. Abrams just said after Force Awakens he was done with reboot films and wanted to make his mark in movies with original stories. Two years laters and he hasn't written or directed anything and he is right back to probably reboot Return of the Jedi.

[Edited 9/12/17 15:08pm]

[Edited 9/12/17 15:09pm]

Actually, I value him simply because of the first two seasons of LOST which revived the mood of 70's sci-fi/thriller TV shows (Like The Incredible Hulk pilot, or Six Million Dollar Man), and 60's and 70's movies in a way that was very fresh and convincing, and actually seemed more Star Wars to me then his actual Star Wars movie. I remember watching that first two seasons, and by the time they got into the first hatch with it's retro sci-fi mystical feel, I thought, "this is what Star Wars 1977 felt like to me!" I never imagined he would actually make a Star Wars movie (which I am not a huge fan of at all). I think his Star Trek movies are all flash, smoke and mirrors, and emphatic emotion with no story / plot structure substance. But it seems younger audience these days like it that way.

Yeah, I saw that movie and remember thinking this movie makes no sense. In what military, can you skip from ensign to captain? On top of that, Kirk just graduated from the Academy. It's the complete lack of interest in those details that annoy me. Also Kirk is kicked off the Enterprise on some barren planet instead of being held in the brig. He gets chased by a monster and runs into a random cave and old Spock is there. Did Spock jump into the alternative timeline and knew Kirk would would be there? I don't know, it's never explained.

Abrams only cares about individual scenes and has no interest in how it all fits together as a whole. This has been his weak point for his whole career. He has a whole theory called the "Mystery Box" where you keep the audience in the dark about every plot point until the very end and at that point they wont care how the story is concluded. You have to be a master storyteller like Hitchcock to pull off something like that. And Abrams aint Hitchcock. And now he is in charge of wrapping the whole trilogy to a satisfying conclusion.