Rant: I can’t stand JJ Abrams’ films.
Originally posted to Reddit but reposted here for backup and self-reliance.
Wall of text incoming. I've seen almost everything JJ has ever touched, and I tend to be a deep lore geek on anything I watch. I DESPISE most things JJ touches and I think I have receipts to back it up. I'm a sci-fi geek, and the thing that kills me the MOST about JJ is that he uses sci-fi and builds mystery and lore to lure you in, does a whole bunch of jaw-dropping lore building and flashy cinematics, then does a bait and switch at the end for a relational story, often coupling that with a retconning or ignoring of the sci-fi lore he built over years.
Prologue, he wrote Armageddon, where they decided it was easier to train oil riggers to be astronauts instead of training astronauts to run a drill. But the drama of the story is around Bruce Willis and his Daughter, the space-asteroid-etc is really inconsequential other than it's a mechanism for the dad to have to sacrifice himself to fix things with his daughter.
Let's start with Alias, where he was Writer/Director/Creator. MAN it was good. Spy vs. Spy, 2 competing agencies with ever more secret bases, team switching, and all under the guise of the mysterious puppeteer RAMBALDI who was a Renaissance era dude leaving artifacts that meld EXACTLY with 2000's technology to unleash an endgame by like injecting people with magic drugs and making crazy magnetic liquids. It was AWESOME. Then they built this design from his stuff called the Mueller device, which WHO KNOWS what it does except make a red ball of magic liquid float over it (keep note of this). They build a small one, then they build a room-sized one and the liquid destabilizes and KILLS A DUDE. Now the main girl has a sister, and she's a bad spy, and both sisters were sketched by Rambaldi a million years ago, and you inject her with his drug and OMG SHE IS BEING PUPPETEERED TO BE A SUPER ASSASSIN OMG FINDING ARTIFACTS OMG SPY MISSIONS OMG. It was awesome. It culminated in season 4 when someone built a DOOMSDAY MUELLER DEVICE floating over a city in Russia with a mountain-sized ball of the red goop! And they get there and controlled-sister and the main girl have to have a giant kung-fu fight on the rooftop under the ball! WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!? WHAT IS THE ENDGAME?!?
The endgame is nothing. The sister almost kills the main girl, the sister's dad shoots her but doesn't kill her, the main girl's mom tells her how to shut the device off, the main girl tells her boyfriend to save her unconscious sister, and they run away as a mountain of poison falls. We basically never hear of Rambaldi or these stupid devices again, the important thing was that they were a family and the relationships therein. Season 5 had a stupid out-of-left-field plot that had nothing to do with the first 4 seasons (main girl's fiancee was secretly a triple agent the whole time with a different name and as he's telling her this he's almost assassinated so he basically doesn't appear in season 5 ta-da). But hey we see a lot of family healing, so that's cool right.
Then let's talk Lost. I don't know what I can say that hasn't already be said, since everyone at the time saw it and it concluded with the 2nd most disappointing ending of all time behind Game of thrones. Toss mystery sci-fi spooky island expanding lore for 5 seasons and 17 episodes, only to have the final episode end in some sort of religious waiting room ethereal church where they're told the mysteries don't matter as long as everyone from the island could be together and appreciate the times they spent. Main jerkberg puts a magic cork stone in a magic glow-water pool and somehow the time-and-space travelling magic island with 2 fighting ying-yang ghost wizards just doesn't matter anymore. This was when I started noticing the trend...dangle sci-fi at us to bring us in, switch it to a heartwarming story of togetherness where the lesson is "the magic and lore and answers don't matter as long as we have each other."
Mission impossible was fine.
Both Fringe and Cloverfield came out in 2008, but I'm placing Cloverfield first. The main reason is that it cemented "Slusho!" as a cross-universe lore easter egg that tied this movie into Heroes...which followed the same format, bunch of sci-fi lore which expands exponentially (every answer poses 2 more questions) and is ultimately disappointingly resolved by the writers strike...but kind of came back and limped along and finished. Slusho brings it back into the JJ-verse, so Heroes' shortcomings can be added to his resume...he really fleshed out the genre here, and he consulted (as well as Lost and GoT's DD) on the concept.
But Cloverfield. Standalone, it's fine. In context...it follows JJ's one-trick of building an incredible lore (look at the alternate-reality-game stuff done before to promote the movie) just to have a shaky-cam semi-horror monster movie where you never see the monster. Sure you see the little monsters, but you see the big monster for about 20 seconds? This was a relationship story between 2 young adults told over a monster, it ends with the line "I had a good day." It could have been a movie about a hurricane, or a movie about getting food poisoning, but they get you to the theater thinking you're seeing a monster movie only to show you a relationship story. I remember in the lead-up frame-grabbing the promotional stuff, where they had videos of people at Coney Island (holding Slusho) watching a mystery thing splash down in the ocean from space behind them, WHAT DOES IT MEAN! It meant nothing. And spawned 2 more non-sci-fi turds, 10 cloverfield lane (a serial killer movie, not an alien invasion movie...again sci-fi is used to get you in, but it's a bait and switch, it wasn't bad though) and the cloverfield paradox.
So now Fringe. Fringe to me was the most maddening of all JJ projects and the one that is most deserving of criticism. Not that it was bad, but because it betrayed its own premise. Allow me to explain. At the bumpers of commercial breaks, there were series of dots and glyphs which, if you paid a ton of attention, turned into a secret code which gave a clue to the next episode. https://fringe.fandom.com/wiki/Glyphs If you do this level of sci-fi spy lore building to your fans, you expect them to be watching your show with a pad and paper looking for details. And there were a LOT of details. If you unleash the fanbase to look for details in your show, you better make sure your show makes sense. Fringe made no sense. In season 1 episode 1, a guy dies, and they use a sensory deprivation tank to literally talk to him past his death. They use the same tech to interview another dead guy's subconscious post-death. WALTER HAS THE TECH TO READ MINDS AND A LOOSE SENSE OF SCIENTIFIC ETHICS. They also find little glass disks full of encoded info embedded in bad guys' hands. There's all this sci-fi mystery going on in every episode tied to "the pattern." It turns out an FBI agent working with main girl was a double agent the whole time for "the pattern." Once they figure it out and capture the guy...he says he won't talk and they go "Aww shucks" and leave him rotting in a cell. He's probably still there now. Your own lore says you can load people in tanks and read their mind and talk to them, and an "I won't talk" stops you from solving this whole stupid story in episode like 10? Why are we not scanning everyone for disks? The further you go, the entire sci-fi premise is dragged along by personal stories and finally there's something akin to a conclusion, but it's a show that tells you to think hard about it, then insults you if you think too hard about it.
By this point in history, I am thoroughly pissed at JJ. I hate that he uses sci-fi and lore to lure me in, only to disappoint me. I've sworn off any shows he makes, despite how alluring the internet hive-mind hype is. But Trek is different, there's only 1 fandom I'm a part of deeper than trek. So when JJ took over Trek, I was CONCERNED because I knew I'd have to watch more of his GARBAGE again. "Oh dear god don't disrespect the lore to tell stories about relationships, this is bigger than you JJ!" That's what I said. I said that before he forked the timeline, re-used the red-matter asset from Alias (yes literally re-used the frigging effect asset), destroyed the planet Vulcan and most of their race, eliminated the weight of the threat of death (injecting Khan blood brings dead things back to life...they have like 300 Khan's frozen on ice, so they have infinite anti-death cures)...and ignored the fact that Uhura and Scotty had a hint of romance in OG Trek V so he could tell a forbidden love story between her and Spock. WORST TREK EVER. The worst part to me is that Trek is at its best when it's telling a story that challenges humanity to be its best as a reflection of the time it was made...The JJ verse tells nothing. It's a lens-flare action trilogy with no heart that pisses on 50 years of Trek-dom.
Super 8 was fine the same way McDonalds is tasty...it's the same thing you consumed in the 80's so if you like nostalgia and no depth you will be satisfied for a couple of hours as long as you don't think too hard about what you're consuming.
The one fandom I am into more than Trek is Star Wars. I know everything about star wars. I know more about star wars than most people know about everything they know. I would literally leave my wife to marry Dave Filoni. You don't mess with Star Wars. The prequels should have shown ANYONE that you DO NOT mess with star wars lore. No one hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans.
JJ did Star Wars so dirty it makes me see red. TLJ can't be fully blamed on him, but it really seems JJ makes big plans and seeds lore and doesn't write the ending until midnight the day before it's due...having a fleshed out, written down plan in the hands of Kathleen Kennedy (not a fan) could have averted a LOT of problems with TLJ. (NOT ALL) But TRS...what the hell. Bringing Palpatine back spits on Anakin's sacrifice, Rey and Kylo didn't need a romance, Having all past (and living?) Jedi come to give Rey THE POWER OF TOGETHERNESS to defeat the toughest dark-sider of all time after 7 minutes of training, having Finn be like "hey I have a gut feeling, that's kind of the force too!", making a death-star-scale weapon become a turret gun you can mount on any RV...introducing overpowered retro-disrespectful lore in a property with deep lore is insulting and unforgivable. And he's done it twice now. He's left fans hand-waving about "it's not really canon is it" about 2 major sci-fi franchises!
The WORST thing of it is he gets away from it. Lost? Blame DD. Star Wars? Oh Lucasfilm and Disney meddled. JJ cannot finish a sci-fi story to save his life, but he can sure lure you in with mysteries. What's next...rebooting Harry Potter except wizarding comes from midichlorians or something?
JJ cannot write a sci-fi story with a satisfying ending. He cannot be handed an existing property and be expected to pay any reverence to it other than passing-meme nostalgia references. His movies are worse than bad...they're good enough to make non-fans say "hey that looked pretty good" but given that he works in the field of lore-building sci-fi, his resume is a dumpster fire of disappointment. I don't know why ANYONE would pay money to see something he had his hands in, and I don't know why he is allowed to touch any existing franchises. If you want to make stories about relationships and togetherness fine but stop using sci-fi as a lure, and for the love of god stop slapping your agenda on franchises with existing history!