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

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.

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.

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. ®