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.
I definitely enjoyed the movies, but at the risk of sounding like a gatekeeper, they didn’t really feel like Trek. It felt more to me like an action sci-fi in the vein of, say, Avatar, with a coat of Trek paint to lure the fans in.
Still enjoyable, mind you, but not really something I remember when I think of the Trek universe.
The '09 Star Trek movie, judged on its merits as a Star Trek movie, was a pretty good Star Wars movie.
I agree they’re not Trek, but they are much closer than any show after Enterprise.
Lol no, that’s a ridiculous statement.
Reminder: the only new Trek since Enterprise are devoid of Berman / Roddenberry and are the Kurtzman abominations. Discovery and Picard are Star Wars sequel trilogy tier.
You do realize that Frakes is ALL OVER the new Treks? Is fucking Commander Riker not Trek enough for you?
The presence of the legendary Patrick Stewart, the most iconic of all Trek actors, does not make Picard a Trek show. It makes it even worse. It’s like if you brought Mark Hammill back to Star Wars to be a grumpy slouch.
No I completely agree with you. Without those first two Abrams Trek movies, I probably wouldn’t have ever watched any of the Trek shows.
Him and Rian Johnson fucked Star Wars though. Completely ruined it for me and I refuse to watch any new Star Wars content.
I will honestly say that, as someone who did not like Rogue One (I seem to be in a small minority), Andor was one of the best sci-fi series I’d seen in a while. I recommend watching it. It’s only barely related to the rest of Star Wars. There’s no Force or Jedi in it.
Rogue One and Solo were my two favorite of the Disney abominations. They were solid movies. Andor was amazing and could be watched by anyone who liked sci-fi: the story was compelling.
If they told more stories about not-jedi or troopers, it would be great.
Yeah Disney seems to think that if they’re not constantly bombarding us with references to characters and stories we’re nostalgic about, people will lose interest. Doesn’t matter if the story is shit, if there’s a Skywalker popping their head into the frame every few minutes saying “remember me?”, people will love it.
Andor proves that all we want is a good fucking story.I’m at the point where I don’t think it’s that, but that the writers have been such high turnover/overworked/on-striked for the last 8 years that it’s all they can come up with.
Like what’s happening with Marvel right now, how multiple projects are having the exact same issue of having the overview but none of the specifics. Blade has been rewritten like 4 times now, Daredevil:BA has been reworked at least 3 times now I believe as well and recently decided that Netflix’s content actually will be canon, so…
That is basically the same story for Star Wars. Except IMO it’s even worse because J.J. Abrams basically made Star Trek a Star Wars movie and then when he got the opportunity to plan out a full trilogy he declines? Then when he doesn’t like the direction he comes back and doesn’t expand but retcons?
There’s no plan because it seems like there’s no longstanding consistent writers or team involved (Abrams + Kasdan, Johnson, then the Kasdan’s again) to have a full overarching story.
All that said, there are elements of all of them that I think are done really well. I don’t quite have the same perception of 8 for Luke’s character, visions of the Dark Side had him falter and the action onset Ben’s descent. It’s nearly a self fulfilling cycle and I don’t think it is entirely “out of character” for Luke so much as that scene to me feels like PTSD from his vision in Empire. He then emulates his Master Yoda, isolating and living on the land and minimizing his connection to the Force.
I think it works very well for his character with the circumstances surrounding it. What I’m more skeptical on is him leaving a cryptic pathway to finding him and the amount of time that passes through the rest of the movie, and his general demeanor when he’s found.
I have other issues with it, but overall I think it would have worked fine if the next movie had supported any of it, instead of just trying to “fix” whatever wasn’t part of the original vision. 9 has some aspects I like about it though, I think the Force Dyad was actually alright, their kiss isn’t my favorite but the way I see it is more of a merging of The Force than romance. tbh I can’t remember much else at the moment, I just know I’m like 50/50 on the sequels, there’s some parts that are conceptually really good and pulled of moderately well and then others that just make no sense and would clearly have been avoided with any semblance of some foresight.
I actually loved the Last Jedi and it’s by far my favorite of the sequel trilogy. The reason I liked it so much is that it took some genuine risks instead of retreading the same familiar story structure. While Johnson made some controversial decisions, it was way more interesting than JJ’s retcon nostalgia bait fluff. I’m sad RJ didn’t get to finish the trilogy.
I would have been interested to see where he went with it, though I do wish he would have reworked Finns casino plot
Hear here! Andor was a psychological thriller filled with conspiracy and intrigue with the window dressing of Star Wars. It could have taken place anytime, anywhere and still been the same show.
I’ve heard good things but after all this time, I still fume when I hear Star Wars. Maybe one day
Seriously, just watch it. It isn’t a Star Wars story besides the setting. It is the singular thing that gives me some hope the Star Wars franchise can be better than it has been.
Andor is the best Star Wars has ever been, on my opinion. That said (and I think this is why it’s so good), it’s probably closer to Trek than Wars. It actually cares about the people in the world and their reasons for doing things. It cares about motivations and what drives people to do what they do. It wants to use it’s position to analyze humanity, not just make a flashy action movie.
I hated the 2009 movie and Into Darkness, but Beyond was okay-ish.
(Apparently unlike you, I care about ridiculous plot holes so big they destroy the entire premise of Star Trek – after all, (a) how is Starfleet anything but a farce if a mutinous cadet can be promoted straight to captain, (b) what’s the point of starships if you can just beam between star systems, and (c) what’s the point of any dramatic conflict if you can fuckin’ cure death?!)
(a) how is Starfleet anything but a farce if a mutinous cadet can be promoted straight to captain
Pike tagging Kirk like that jolted me right out of the first movie. Just… no. I still found it enjoyable overall, but the contrivances really detracted from the experience.
what’s the point of any dramatic conflict if you can fuckin’ cure death?!)
To be fair, Into Darkness isn’t the only Trek thing to have that problem. Lower Decks even makes the relative ease with which main characters return from the dead a plot point.
I agree the films aren’t good trek but they’re still a fun watch, imo, if you keep them in context. If start trek was an action franchise, they’d be presentable outings.
They’re fairly good Star Wars movies wearing Star Trek cosplay. If they weren’t called Star Trek then people wouldn’t have an issue with them. The problem is they are attached to a series about asking questions and looking into humanity, not action.
The third one was just…fine. Like I’m so ambivalent towards it, I don’t have any feeling about it.
“on point and not a caricature” you say? https://youtu.be/k9vHopyEtzs?si=nBc7zRs0_h29MNMl
Right? I like Zachary Quinto as an actor, but that Spock was not Spock. And yes, I know, the Kelvin Event changed everything… so why not just invent new characters instead of shoehorning new personalities into beloved ones?
Because JJ doesn’t have original thoughts, but sure does love to pander to nostalgia!
B/c like modern AI, it was more “cost-effective” to simply take the older ones, and do whatever they wanted with them, regardless of our consent.
And just as lazy.
Heaven forbid we have all original characters. We can’t even have them in Disco and SNW and I like Disco and SNW… but Star Trek and Star Wars both have this Dickensian issue where every show has to be connected to every other show not just through the worldbuilding that has already been done, they actually have to share characters at least sometimes. As fun as crossovers can be, if they were even just kept to a bare minimum it would be nice.
They’re doing a Starfleet Academy show next. I assume it will have Tilly in it. What if it had zero characters in common with any of the other shows except for the very occasional crossover or reference, and maybe never with any of the main casts of any of the other series?
When Gene Roddenberry was in charge, things were better. I guess that’s almost stupid to say b/c of how trivially obvious it is but… there it is. He was the original mind behind it all, and without him, the rest is simply cashing in ca-CHING on what he built. I could barely finish watching Enterprise, and (don’t hate me, at least not too much) haven’t been able to force myself to watch anything newer since. Even at the price of “free”, it isn’t the same return on investment compared to e.g. re-watching old episodes of Babylon 5 or something.
But please, don’t mind me and definitely I hope that nobody deprives themselves of at least checking that stuff out to see if it might be for them.
Oh okay. But peak Trek literally was when Roddenberry was ousted, during the Berman era. As much as Roddenberry is worshipped, his contribution to Star Trek is rather small by now and Star Trek has outgrown his legacy. TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT and the TOS movies all came after Roddenberry.
True, like DS9 was arguably the best of all, but then Enterprise was… not, so while I agree about Berman it’s somehow like the closer to Roddenberry the better while the further away the worse.
TNG, DS9, and VOY really grappled with deeper ethical situations and made you think, much like TOS, so were true to the universe setup and purpose for which Star Trek was originally designed. Enterprise I guess tried to do that for like a hot minute but then just became so boring I could barely stand it even just in the background while I did other things.:-(
For everything after that it’s not really fair for me to speak of what I lack direct knowledge of, except to say why I didn’t bother investigating on my own - bc they too looked the same as in trying to cash in on the franchise, without putting in the effort to fully deserve a place alongside them (or so reviews seemed to suggest). i.e. they weren’t told for the purpose of delighting and amazing the audience - as TOS, TNG, etc. made you feel - but rather simply to exist as yet one more thing to click on. i.e. they were sitting on this cash cow and wanted to find a way to collect from nostalgia of the past rather than make something that truly deserved to exist for its own sake.
It’s wonderful to be creative and make up your own universe that tells whatever story you wanted told - e.g. Farscape, Doctor Who, even Andromeda as controversial as its star may be - and Star Trek was one of if not the best universe… originally, and with some fantastic sequels too, but eventually it’s like what happened when Disney bought out Star Wars, it became all about cranking out that assembly line whimsey.
Agreed.
Also, I don’t hate the SW 7-9 any more than the previous six. They are sci-fi spectacles and none of them were brilliant pieces of writing. Plot holes and magic galore.
The first one was pretty great, I couldn’t get through the second though and actually heard good things about the third. The second put me off even trying the third.
As incentive to watch it, Abrams had no involvement with Beyond and it was basically a Simon Pegg production, and Pegg genuinely loves Trek.
I found it an okay film that did the best it could with pretty weak material beforehand, but mostly forgettable. If Simon Pegg was given a clean slate, he could have done something much more interesting.
Just a small nitpick: Star Trek Beyond was directed by Justin Lin, not Abrams, and was written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung. Abrams only produced.
Lost and Star Wars are unforgivable sins.
Early Lost was solid. Then, we got the other “others,” they killed off the best character, and the ending everybody predicted (which was vehemently denied) totally happened.
I said this elsewhere in the thread. I was with Lost all the way to the end. I kept thinking, “okay, we will get answers.” And then we got to the final episode. Most of the mysteries were not answered and the ones that were did not get very good answers.
It pissed me off as much as the last episode of BSG pissed me off for the same “let’s just throw everything we’ve built out the window, fuck it” reason.
Wasn’t Abrams only involved with the production of the pilot and then minimally involved with the first season? From my understanding he pretty much had no involvement and Damien Lindelof had to scratch teeth to try and get some insight on where to go forward.
Then between the writers strikes and well…
Abrams starting something with no idea of where it will go or what’s in his mystery box then handing it off to someone else to finish was basically his entire career. I’m not sure he ever actually had to finish anything until Rise of Skywalker.
Competent Director, and completely incompetent story teller. Just like Rian Johnson!
I think you got that the wrong way around
No, Rian Johnson is a pretty shit storyteller as well.
A competent storyteller would have seen that Carrie Fisher died, looked at the release window of the movie, with a full year left, and then ordered a single reshoot to kill Leia off instead of pulling a Space Merry Poppins.
He also completely abandoned Finn’s Force potential in favor of whatever the fuck that casino raid was.
And then there was the noble sacrifice that Finn was going to make, which was foiled because he decided that Finn should have a love interest, but didn’t lay any of the groundwork for it, and the sacrifice could have actually saved the day.
So instead, he invents the hyperspace kamikaze.
Honestly, that entire movie felt like a long filler sequence. The stakes never actually changed, and there was no payoff of anything. It was a placeholder movie, only meant to be the second in a trilogy. And the fans hated it so much that the last movie spent a good amount of runtime retconning it all.
There’s also him taking the whole buildup of Snoke as the big bad and then turning him into just some dude who dies right after being encountered.
Then, he turns out to be a clone remotely controlled because…
The Extended Universe (which Disney rightfully expunged from canon) actually explained Palpatine’s return quite well.
And yes, it was cloning. Palpatine cloned himself a bunch of times, and used the dark side of the force to body hop to a new clone when the old one wore out. Which they did at an accelerated pace due to the corrupting influence of the dark side.
That was the original reason why Vader was more machine than man, because the Dark side, for all its power, was literally stripping the life out of them.
Then Lucas came along with the prequels and decided, no, the dark side isn’t some corrosive thing, it’s just the force being used by mean people.
I mean, seriously? What difference is there between the light side and the dark side when you watch the movies? Seems to be none. Just that the dark side is fueled by emotion? That it? Okay then.
Worse than that- in the prequels, the Jedi were pretty fucking awful too. They propped up the corrupt Old Republic and what they did with children was just inexcusable, so if they represented the light side of the force, the light side isn’t that much better than the dark side, if better at all.
And if it’s all so morally ambiguous, why does The Force have two sides to it?
Worse than that- in the prequels, the Jedi were pretty fucking awful too.
Well ya. That WAS the point. Anakin literally said “from my point of view the Jedi are evil”, and it’s because the Jedi completely lost what it meant to find balance with the force.
And the Force has two sides because it has two opposing, but directly related aspects. Like positive and negative charges, or light and dark (in the conceptual sense). How can you tell the light without darkness?
IIRC, this is something the EU had explored with Luke. He approaches his New Jedi Order with a balanced mindset of the Force.
Snoke should’ve been Jar Jar Binks.
Which could have been a good twist, but instead it was a wet turd in a sea of sUbVeRtInG eXpEcTaTiOnS
This take assumes all of this was his decision and not the studio with billions sunk into a franchise they were desperate to milk.
Look at his other movies, like Brick or Knives Out, he can direct a movie to fucking greatness. And he is committed to writing AND directing so the only way those ham fisted bullshit narrative loopholes could find their way into his movie is if it was put there by studio interference. I agree that he had a couple of bad ideas which changed the physics of Star Wars, showing a misunderstanding of the material, but he was always a film nerd who loved Star Wars for its technical innovations and story telling techniques and not a committed fan who loved the universe.
Rian Johnson is a good director who had uncharacteristic ideas in his one big studio movie that didn’t fit his normal output.
The thing is- Brick and Knives Out are not sci-fi. It takes a certain kind of person to do sci-fi properly and it wasn’t him. Norman Jewison was a great director, but I wouldn’t call Rollerball an amazing piece of science fiction. Robert Altman’s only science fiction film, Quintet, was rightfully a flop because it was awful. Howard Hawks was an incredible director, but The Thing from Another World, his only science fiction movie, is pretty darn cheesy.
All three men were very talented, but none of them really understood sci-fi.
He did direct Looper though, which is top tier sci-fi.
6 movies that tell the rise, fall, and redemption of the Skywalker family just for 3 more movies to have them stumble, fall again, die out, and ultimately have the galaxy be saved by the big bad’s grand daughter who came out of no where, but it’s ok, she’s a Skywalker in spirit 🤷♂️
Late-stage capitalism sucks donkey balls. There’s nothing at all wrong with money, but to chase after it to the exclusion of all else… is not so good. :-(
Chasing short term profits undermines the possibility of building a brand on quality beyond the expansion and buyout phase. So many companies that were known for making quality products with quality service were bought out and run into the ground as shadows of their former selves after being bought out by investment firms that wanted the name and reputation but not the actual production and support costs that the brand was built on.
It’s parasitism - they latch onto something successful, then as you said run it into the ground, then leave it to someone else to deal with the mess. It is SO MUCH HARDER to build something as a mutualistic symbiosis, hence it’s easier if they just… don’t.:-(
I meant that J J Abrams has done some good work as well, like Fringe and Lost and Cloverfield.
Here is the best description of J.J. Abrams:
He is able to tell a really good cliffhanger.
Give him a single project. Super 8? Cloverfield? The Pilot of Lost?
It’s hard to deny their merits. But then he’s given projects like Star Trek, which he used to show he could make a Star Wars movie. Then he got Star Wars and eased into it by retelling A New Hope and abandoned it.
It’s hard to look at something like Looper or Knives Out and say Rian Johnson is a bad storyteller. He fucked up The Last Jedi and owns that in interviews, but you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re writing him off completely.
A lot of that criticism though also comes from Abrams and his decision to just not use anything from TLJ. It wouldn’t have felt like placeholder or filler if the liberated casino planet came back in RoS as a major ally, or if Luke’s force ghost continued to teach Rey, etc. It’s like if RotJ ignored the ESB and said Vader actually wasn’t Luke’s father and Han broke out offscreen and Lando wasn’t ever seen again.
How do you figure that?
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 honestly don’t mind his movies. Movie Trek has always been action for the most part anyways and, also, would kind of fuck up the characters. Hell First Contact turned Picard into a mentally unhinged action hero.
Also I still say Kirk being a rocker fucking fits yo.
Also I still say Kirk being a rocker fucking fits yo.
Except that it’s like calling you a rocker because you listen to Vivaldi. Star Trek used to pretend music ended with classical. Then J.J. decided to pretend it ended with the Beastie Boys.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like the Beastie Boys and Sabotage is a terrific song… but it would be a weird quirk like Alex listening to Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange, not a sign that he’s a rockin’ rebel.
Eh true, but you hit on what drove me so fucking crazy in…basically all of it. The only listen to music thats already classic by our standards. Music thats classic by our standards. I hated that.
On the plus side, if music’s been classic for 300 years, there’s a decent chance it’ll still be classic in another 300 years. It’s a bit unusual to be a fan of Gregorian chant now, but not shocking.
On the other hand, if something’s been a classic for 30 years, chances are it’ll be a footnote for music historians in another 300.
It did annoy me in other Trek shows, but it was only in the J. J. movie where it was meant to show ‘Kirk is a badass kid.’ When Data played in a string quartet on TNG, it wasn’t meant to show how cool Data was.
Movie Trek has always been action for the most part anyways
The Motion Picture and The Voyage Home.
…and, also, would kind of fuck up the characters. Hell First Contact turned Picard into a mentally unhinged action hero.
Picard always had that possibility inside him. After all, that sort of behavior is why he had an artificial heart. I thought that scene in First Contact worked amazingly well, TBH.
(If anything, the unrealistic portrayal of Picard is how he was immediately mostly back to normal after The Best of Both Worlds, as if it never even happened.)
Those are two examples of when it wasn’t just action which really fits with what I said about how it’s only for the most part usually just action.
But okay I’ll admit you have a point about Picard
I’d say after Family, the following episode, but you’re right otherwise.
But Fringe was amazing!
Fringe started amazing, then hit the wall fucking hard in the final season. Classic Abrams. Even he didn’t know what was really going on and when he had to start explaining shit it fell apart in a right hurry. See Lost for further examples.
The only show that ever did time travel right was Continuum.
Have you seen Travelers? I think it does time travel very well too.
Also, the 12 Monkeys TV show was pretty good.
There’s another one I can think of, but the time travel element is kind of a spoiler.
True, I feel like they were forced to conclude everything too quickly, and they should have done some more monster of the week episodes.
I’ll never forgive him for undoing Rian Johnson’s work on Star Wars. Johnson’s take was more on line with Lucas’.
Exactly. TFA was great! But it was just a rehash of ANH at the end of the day. Abrams set up a bunch of questions in a trilogy that was going to have different directors.
Then Johnson gave some answers, as you’d expect. And however you feel about TLJ, Abrams actively made things worse when he was brought back for RoS. He said fuck those answers, I’m going to ignore that whole movie and “somehow, Palpatine returns” instead and redo RotJ.
Even worse he fucked up the whole series with his force healing and resurrection. A monastic warrior order focused on peace somehow forgot about
the iron fleetusing the force to heal people. He invented force dyads, which are somehow more powerful than someone who was fathered by the Force. Kylo and Rey can resurrect each other, but Anakin couldn’t resurrect Padme? He fell to the dark side over a possibility he could’ve totally fixed?Abrams basically said Anakin wasn’t the chosen one and that he was insignificant. That’s a far bigger sin than anything Johnson did.
I mean… the “chosen one” thing was really something the series didn’t need in the first place but I agree in all other points.
He deserves a lot of the blame for fumbling that landing badly, but I also suspect he didn’t have the kind of freedom that Johnson had, and he had to keep the studio happy above all. I can’t imagine the pressure and interference he must have had to deal with on that film. I can only hope that the studio learned a lesson from that that when you squeeze your artists too hard, all you get is shit.
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JJ is great at build up Mystery boxes. He can craft this big world changing question and hype around it all.
Then, when it comes time to open the box, you find that it’s a pair of old gym socks with more holes than sock.
You then find out that he spent the entire writing budget on more lens flares.
Or: When it’s time to open the box, be denies the box ever existed.
He created Fringe, so I’ll give him that.
Fringe is better then Lost and ill die on this hill.
I just finished another rewatch of Fringe, such an amazing show!
And how cool was it to have Leonard Nimoy in a sci-fi show again?
Yes! So great as both a good guy and a bad guy too!
You won’t be alone there.
Lost was the fucking worst. I regret watching it.
I was honestly okay with it right up to the last episode. Then suddenly it was “the island is fixable with a cork” and “everyone’s in heaven” and “no, we’re never answering any of those other mysteries,” the end.
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That is way too many fan theories to explain away a bad ending.
I really liked Super 8 when I saw it in theaters but I haven’t watched it since then
It was okay. I wouldn’t call it exceptional. Out of the many sci-fi films that came out in 2011, it was one of them.
I don’t know if he is any good as I can’t get past the generic plots and can’t see anything but lens flare.
Heh. J.J. Abrams and lens flare, meet your match, Zack Snyder and Slow-Mo
There is indeed a school of cinema devoted to that.
All he has are those two things and mystery boxes that are empty.
JJ is a hype man with nothing to support it quality wise, but he does seem to make things that make money so Hollywood loves him.
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.
Except he did fuck with it because now the Kelvin Incident is canon. And destroying Romulus with a big red blob is bullshit.
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.
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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.
