Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/05/21/star_wars_jj_abrams_overrated_director/

JJ Abrams and Star Wars: I've got a bad feeling about this

No original ideas? Can't finish a story? Come right in, Mr Abrams

By Gavin Clarke

Posted in Legal, 21st May 2014 09:10 GMT

“Boys are only interested in pirates and Star Wars,” my daughter tells me. She is four and speaks with the confidence and clarity only a four-year-old can manage.

Star Wars

Thirty-seven years on, and the Star Wars franchise still captures kids' imaginations

Her proof? The games played, toys brought in and the clothes worn by the boys in her class at pre-school.

Star Wars is doing well: pirates have been swashing a buckle and terrorising the high seas for centuries. Yet Star Wars is 37 years old.

When I was four it was still either pirates or cowboys – Star Wars hadn’t yet been released. The last word in Christmas or birthday presents back then was a set of tasselled chaps, a six-shooter with holster and a Stetson.

Cowboys are now gone, like a tumbleweed rolling across the Old West.

The fact Star Wars has endured is a comment on the power of the original three films (episodes IV, V and VI), taking Star Wars beyond being mere film to become a cross-generation cultural force. Star Wars generated plenty of imitators at the time, but few - if any - are remembered.

Star Wars succeeded because of the films’ simple and accessible metaphor – it was a straight tale of good guys versus bad, like the white knight versus the dark knight or "cowboys vs Indians" – though history has vindicated Native Americans, of course.

But the canvas for this epic was not the Earthly Old West or fictitious Arthurian Britain: it was space – a word whose very mention widens the eyes.

Only Star Wars' concept of space was a new telling of space. Space before Star Wars had mostly been a camp Saturday romp. Satin cat suits in Buck Rogers and phallic-shaped rocket ships belching smoke in Flash Gordon.

Star Wars is the grit of Tatooine and the blaster-scarred space ships that are of jaw-dropping scale, like the Imperial Destroyer that noses into shot and keeps coming and coming in the opening scenes of Episode IV. Death is brutal and the Empire is merciless – really merciless, not Ming merciless. There's no last-minute reprieve for Alderaan.

Ming the Merciless: Not to be found a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

And don't forget the characters: a dark knight (Vader), a roguish pirate with a fast ship and a prickly princess spitting out catchy one-liners.

Star Wars hasn't stood still like some museum piece during its thirty-odd years. It's not under glass like Citizen Kane, a gravity-defying masterpiece that critics endlessly debate but which remains a work of art behind a velvet rope. Star Wars has become a living thing that is evolving.

On the good side, there's Clone Wars the animated series, a surprising little gem that has proved stylish and creative.

During three decades the Empire has become cool, with Obama-style wall art of Boba Fett for the front room of your batch pad while students or beer heads get T-shirts of Storm Trooper heads placed on the bodies of Pulp Fiction's hitmen Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield - the ultimate in cross-cultural pollination.

Star Wars has been copied, satirised, referenced and paid homage to, in everything from Spaceballs on the big screen, Family Guy on TV and Angry Birds for the social networking crowd.

On the dark side of that trend, however, is Jar Jar Binks and the Disneyification of Star Wars, through the addition of things like furry aliens.

Please, please, please don't wreck it

Now the keys to the Star Wars car have been handed to JJ Abrams, who is directing Episode VII: The Ancient Fear.

Starry-eyed: Abrams and his crew aren't giving away anything about the latest film

Abrams has become Hollywood’s go-to man on sci-fi, getting the job of helming not only the latest Star Wars instalment, but space fans' other touchstone, Star Trek. How this happened is not clear. It can only be through Abrams' persistence in mining the genre, as he has actually brought very little to it that's new.

Fans – as fans are wont to do when somebody takes on something they cherish – are concerned that Abrams will somehow trample their film, thus devaluing and discrediting it, and consigning it to the dustbin of history. Abrams knows this and has gone on a soft offensive, saying: "Everyone is doing their best to make the fans proud."

I don't worry that Abrams will damage or destroy Star Wars. I'm actually rather optimistic. But my optimism doesn't come from a belief in the quality of Abrams' work, quite the opposite. I expect his output will be so dire it can only embellish the original films and enshrine their legend.

Abrams isn't known for original ideas. A glance over his credits as director, scriptwriter and producer will show you that.

Armageddon, the disaster film for which Abrams wrote the screenplay, was one of many in the long line of asteroid disaster movies that just happened to came out at almost the exact same time as that other asteroid disaster movie, Deep Impact.

Cloverfield, which Abrams produced, was Godzilla from space set in New York with a cast of forgettable young Manhattanites who had absolutely no redeeming features. Meanwhile, Abrams has gone back to the sequels fountain on Mission: Impossible – not once but twice, with a third in the offing for 2015.

Khan!!!!!

Armageddon was flat-footed and cliché-ridden, the plot so thin that it scored a pitiful 40 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes – and it helped shove Bruce Willis into winning a Razzie. Abrams’ screenplay was also nominated for a Razzie but lost to An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn.

Nor can Abrams see a story through to a convincing conclusion - he's all setup and no payoff.

His TV programme Lost limped on for years through ever more ridiculous theories, with a climax, which was six years too late, that was about as original as "I woke up and it was all a dream."

2011's Super 8, which Abrams directed, produced and wrote, started with suitable menace but turned soft and fuzzy as it became clear that the film's train-destroying alien was looking for its kid.

Original ideas? Yeah, right

Abrams tried to bring something new to the party: this being the age of YouTube and selfies, and his big idea was the camera – the story being told through the perspective of the characters filming each other. At the end of Cloverfield, you get a hint of the conflagration through the PoV of the camera followed by a message saying the film is government property.

Cloverfield poster

Promising: Cloverfield failed to live up to the pre-release hype

Abrams dabbled with camera's-eye-view story telling on Cloverfield, too, but the idea proved limiting for the telling of the story. Besides, if you’d seen The Blair Witch Project, you were already over this idea.

Based on Abrams' recent sci-fi work with Star Trek, the omens for Star Wars are troubling. There was an encouraging start on the first film, but on the second Abrams squandered arguably Star Trek’s best asset: Khan.

In the original series and in the film Wrath of Khan, you can feel Khan’s presence: he is a Hannibal Lecter of mind games and menace, a Nietzschean with a megalomaniac super-man complex who is smooth and softly spoken in the best traditions of Nazi-style villains.

He can, and does, wipe out a space station of boffins, stringing them all up: we see the aftermath. He can, and does, put aliens in people’s brains to render them susceptible to his control. We see it happen, popping the slimy crawlers into the helmets of the hapless Chekov and Terrell.

In the newer film? Sure, Cumberbatch said he was better at everything, but where was the proof? Yeah, Spock popped up to call Khan the worst adversary in the universe, but that was it. It was all talk and flappy coat. Khan was such a deadly adversary he failed to kill the Federation brass he'd cleverly assembled.

What we got from Abrams was some guff about Khan as a (super)man done wrong by the Federation system. And at the end? No epic showdown or Ahab-like destruction. Khan was neatly boxed up in cryo for the next sequel.

Marketing spiel - sadly, his works

What Abrams is good at doing is marketing his films. When I went into Cloverfield and Super 8 I did so having been thrilled by what I’d been promised. The feeling I left the cinema with on both occasions wasn't one of being thrilled.

Bored girl

Underwhelmed: An artist's impression

We saw the same push on Star Trek - about the question of whether it was Khan or not. Now on Star Wars we’re getting a drip-drip feed of tweets and "news" (here and here) to make us hungry.

For all the marketing and bluster from Abram's past works, nobody in my daughter's pre-school stomps around like the beasts from Cloverfield or Super 8, or wants to re-create scenes from Armageddon or Mission: Impossible.

Why? Not because they won’t have seen them yet, but because they are so forgettable that nobody who has seen them has bothered handing them down to the new generation.

Based on Abrams' past, Star Wars Episode VII will likely follow in the same creative and marketing footsteps of his past works.

The only good thing from this looming intergalactic wreck? The inevitable fact that people will rediscover the original first three films, a fact that will introduce a new generation to their brilliance and safeguard and perpetuate their legacy.

How can we be so sure? Because Star Wars is still being played out in my daughter's pre-school, despite George Lucas' own attempts to kill it with Episodes I, II and III. ®