I do not like JJ Abrams, nor in my limited experience, have I found much reason to. I feel he’s a hype machine more than someone of actual talent. Perhaps he’s a decent talent evaluator, I’m not really educated to say. There are two reasons I don’t particularly think he’s worth much.
One is, he’s so far seemingly incapable of crafting endings to things. He’s good at building things up, sure, but his endings, when existent (not including cancelled shows and whatnot) are ambiguous or open-ended. This will obviously have a chance to change, when the biggest mass of unresolved mysteries this side of Twin Peaks actually comes to an end next year with “Lost”. If he can finish that one off satisfactorily, I will take back everything negative I’ve said about him. I don’t watch the show myself, but from the ploy synopses I’ve read and heard, there’s an awful lot of balls he’s got in the air there, and it’s hard to juggle that many without it ending in a huge mess.
This is the second reason, something I read earlier today. Apparently JJ Abrams had a script written up for the last Superman movie, the movie that eventually because the utterly useless and pretentious Superman Returns. Here is an exerpt from the article I read:
Abrams’s story re-imagined Superman as a Kryptonian prince sent to earth as a baby to avoid an impending civil war between king Jor-El and his brother Kata-Zor. Raised as Midwestern teen Clark Kent, and in love with his high school sweetheart Lois, Superman becomes humanity's defender when Kata-Zor invades Earth, aided by CIA Agent Lex Luthor, who is actually a Kryptonian in disguise. The film ended with Superman returning to Krypton to rule over his people after the death of Jor-El.
This is one of the stupidest and outrageous things I’ve heard. The only conclusion I could draw from this is that JJ Abrams never saw the Superman movies, nor read the comics, and thus assumed most other people hadn’t either, and would have no problem totally changing every god damn thing about them, other than some of the names.
As a caveat, I enjoyed Star Trek this summer, though I had incredibly low expectations going into it. Most of the performances in that were very good, though the story was hella-stupid.
Next time, I’m going to talk about what celebrity women I’m sick of being told are attractive. That’s a pet peeve of mine!