This won't be popular, but I LOVED his first two Trek movies. Acting was on point without making a caricature of the original people. The call backs in the Kahn movie were great. Both were exciting, engaging, all that.
I have no idea what happened in the third movie. Tried to watch it 4 times. Still never finished it, can't tell you a thing about it.
Begin my punishment. My body is ready.
The problem is he makes decent-to-good original films then slaps a thin veneer of franchise on it. Zero respect for what he's actually making a movie of.
His constant hurling of "mystery boxes" at us was annoying enough. Things like Luke's lightsaber and Maz Kanata's "that is a story for another time"... really? REALLY? Abrams had no backstory for this, at all, he just threw it in there as a fetishistic compulsion, along with so many other things. Which is why none of his stories land in the end.
Speaking of which, then there's his ending TFA in the middle of a scene, as if this was an episode of "Lost" and stay tuned for next week's installment, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.
But the clincher for me is the completely lazy disregard for science and how science works. Instead of doing the homework to at least try to approximate reality, he just did whatever got him to the next page of the saccharine script, to put whatever characters together because it was convenient for him.
In the process of all this, he made the galaxy feel small and flat, instead of vast and grandiose.
We as a culture need to realize that JJ Abrams is just a less edgy Michael Bay.
They both take beloved franchises and do everything they can to kill any interest the old fans have while failing to make something new and interesting for the younger fans. Then they fall back on the aesthetic of the old parts of the franchise, without any of the charm, and keep the same story structure and bad jokes as their new version of the franchise.
I'm conflicted with Abrams. I actually liked The Force Awakens and thought it had alot of potential (despite the seemingly unoriginal story), though JJ Abrams seems to have a history of starting things he can't seem to finish on his own. Last Jedi went off the rails and Rise of Skywalker was just trash. I just want to know who the hell in Disney thought it was a good idea to move ahead with the Sequel trilogy without a clear story or plan on how to proceed with the trilogy? Ultimately Kathleen Kennedy greenlit that shit, so I think she's to blame, but how in the hell does one of the biggest entertainment companies on the planet agree to something like that without it being worked out in advance. At a time when some movie series were getting filmed back-to-back-to-back, how in the hell did they not have a cohesive story figured out beforehand?
I'm ok with his Star Trek movies because he admitted to not having liked Star Trek or watched much of it until he got the job as director for it, and he at least watched enough to learn that he could set it in an alternate timeline that doesn't fuck with the main shit that people actually like; making it super easy to ignore.
Dude always reminds me of an IRL Vorta.
Permanently Deleted
I love his non fandom stuff, but the major franchises should have kept him far away from them, he should just stick to original content.
Nah. I love both TFA and ST'09.
Episode 9 and Into Darkness were not good.
Mission Impossible III and Super 8 were pretty good. He's a brilliant idea man who can direct great action scenes and interesting characters. His weakness is on the follow-through. Just stop giving him sequels and let him direct original stories.
