“I stopped listening to you when you said you didn’t like ‘Star Trek.’ I know what happened because your mouth kept moving after that, so I’m assuming you apologized,” - Jon Stewart
I completely get what he was trying to say. He wanted to make a movie where the massive Trekkies were happy but people like him were happy but fuck me if this wasn’t tone deaf to all hell. I’d say stay behind the camera but honestly stick to writing instead. Fringe was great and so was Lost before it went head over heels. There was another show of his called Alcatraz that was also pretty great. But the franchise movies are very miss-heavy for most people. I like the Kelvin movies but it’s for what they are, not because they’re necessarily great Trek movies.
i agree. the Kelvin films were, technically speaking, popular, crowd-pleasing films. But they were terrible Trek films, devoid of everything that makes Trek Trek. Trek was never meant to be “sci-fi boom-boom action-adventure idiots is space,” but that’s what JJ wanted, and we got 3 films like that. And his audition for George Lucas bagged him 2 Star Wars films, because, c’mon, that’s what it was really all about anyway.
and they were terrible Star Wars films, too. Popular and crowd-pleasing, but terrible.
To his credit, JJ did such a terrible job that it chilled out a lot of the more hostile Star Wars fans and gave us a common enemy lol
word. JJ brought me and my SW friends together and finally got me to watch all of the SW animated shows.
TFA wasn’t bad. Some of the characters were completely wasted(read: Finn) and it was a retread of a new hope, but it was decent.
Kirk and Uhura are caricatures, Spock isn’t anything like Spock, and the plot borders on parody. It’s like Orville but not funny.
TFA was not a terrible star wars film, even for star wars fans. Highly derivative of A New Hope, yes, but many star wars fans were longing for something akin to the original trilogy after the prequel trilogy was… controversial to say the least, and it genuinely seemed like a great place to start.
Rise of Skywalker? Whole 'nother story.
Given the modern state of the movie industry, I understand the desire to make movies with a broader appeal. That was his job. Economics trumps all other considerations.
Sure, but I think you can go for broader appeal and also be philosophical. I think a perfect Trek example is The Best of Both Worlds, which managed to be philosophical about what it means to be human while featuring plenty of pew pew space battle.
EDIT: Also, I think Barbie proved you can make real points about the defects of modern society even with movies that have the broadest appeal possible.
I honestly wonder how much control he actually had over the franchise or blockbuster movies he’s made.
Eg. The Sundance to Blockbuster Franchise pipeline is a well known thing in the industry. They farm talent for their latest franchise movie.
They don’t actually give the directors they hire much (if any) artistic freedom. The movies are far far too expensive to take risks like that. They simply need the name for on the poster, to give their McDonalds movie a veneer of artistic credibility.
It’s sad, because young talent thinks they’re being offered a great opportunity, when in reality they’re being whored out. The large studios know they’re too inexperienced to offer much pushback and that they can pay them less than they’re worth because ‘exposure’.
Obviously JJ is a big name, but I assume he also spends all day fighting with the producers and the studio when making a big movie like this. Or he doesn’t and he basically represents the studios, a bit like that Mitchell and Webb “Are we the baddies?” sketch. I dunno.
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I hate that he’s absolutely obsessed with “red mercury” and puts it in everything including Star Trek.
Like Ridley Scott and milk android or machine-blood. But he only makes original things so he gets a pass.
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i couldn’t find a single source for this on Google, with multiple different word combinations and arrangements. would you please explain what you’re talking about?
In Star Trek Magazine issue 144, Scott Chambliss, production designer on Star Trek, noted that the appearance of red matter as a “big red ball” was a reference to other productions that he had worked on with J.J. Abrams, including Alias and Mission: Impossible III.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Red_matter
It was called Red Mercury in Alias and Red Matter in Star Trek and I didn’t see Mission: Impossible III. The point is it’s a big red ball of stuff and he keeps putting it in his shows and movies.
Where, IMO, a good story should start with some idea of where it’s heading. Maybe not initially, but at least at the broad strokes stage of creating a story.
LENS FLARE! Fringe is one of my all time favorite shows and it’s interesting that he thinks Trek is “too philosophical” when I see a lot of the same human questions and boundary pushing there just set on Earth/Earth 2. LENS FLARE! This guy also highly recommend the two (sloppy, ham-fisted, likely heavily aided by/written by chatgpt) writers of Rings of Power, even though he rejected their script. LENS FLARE!
Edit: **not written or aided by chatgpt, just objectively terrible writing and I’m sorry to the bots for my assumptions about your generative skills
What? How could they have used ChatGPT. It didn’t release for a month after the first season aired.
It just seems like the quality of writing is on par with something that an AI would generate as there was absolutely no real substance whatsoever which, to me, came across as written by a bot. I didn’t realize chatgpt was released after RoP so it’s obviously not written by it, but the script was so bad I thought it could not possibly be written by a living breathing person who understands words but hilariously I’m wrong and now I can’t get the image of these two guys typing word by word into a thesaurus to write.
Yeah it would honestly be better served by an LLM than those writers lol
These muffins taste bad
I remember watching this live and thinking “well that’s not good…”
JON Stewart
That’s embarrassing. Thank you.
