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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7705805" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, it depends on what you are judging them on.  Absolutely.  He's much better behind the camera or as a director than Lucas is.  Lucas is a bit of a bumbler and really it's his improvisational work - dealing with the limitations of his technology and imagining solutions - that actually invokes what we perceive as creativity in shot composition and structure.   Abrams actually knows what he's doing.  TFA is much better directed and much better composed than the prequel trilogy.  His shots are dynamic, and terse, and well-composed, and often beautiful.  TFA is well done movie from that standpoint.  That's one of his problems.  Abrams puts his own stamp on everything he touches, and really he'd be much better off with original material and doing work along the lines of someone like Luc Besson.  He's goofy - in some ways even worse than Lucas.  Worse, he repetitive.  Like if you watch the Star Trek reboot, count how many times he nearly throws Kirk off a high place and has a shot of him clutching a ledge by his fingers.  Worse yet, he sees movies entirely in scenes and has no grasp of plotting.  His movies are always incoherent and suffer badly from fridge logic.  You do not dare think about a JJ Abrams movie, because if you do, you'll start going nuts.  And the problem with having JJ Abrams directing beloved series is that Star Wars and Star Trek fans are entirely about being super obsessive about every little detail of the story and trying to make it real.  That's what we do, and that doing that is rewarding was a very part of why these movies became so culturally important.  TFA openly abandons that, even going so far as to lampshade obsessing over the details and just hand-waving that away as not important.  The plot is a mess that makes no sense and has so many holes in that you need hundreds of pages just to try to pretend it makes some sense in context.  Compare with the deft strokes that the context of a New Hope uses to tell all of that in just a few lines.  "You served my father in the clone wars"  We don't have to know the details about that to understand the story, but it sure sounds cool.  It's not a plot hole that we don't know the major elements of the clone wars.  You could enjoy the story without them.   And so on and so forth.   Honestly, I don't think you can blame JJ Abrams for all the problems with the writing.  There are at least four writers on the project, and probably a couple uncredited story fixers.  I don't know who did what.  On the small scale, some of the writing is pretty good.   It's much better written on a scene by scene basis than say TPM.  The dialogue is a lot less clunky, especially in the first half of the movie.  It's got some good one-liners, which is something TPM lacked.  You aren't going to cringe listening to it unless you start thinking about it  - again 'fridge logic'.  But it starts falling apart in the second half because what they've been building is so vacuous.  And I think that gets to the heart of what I think is the real destructive influence of JJ Abrams on the story, and that's what I call 'X-Files Syndrome'.  'X-Files Syndrome' is a repeated problem we've seen over the last 20-25 years in science fiction media.  It plagued the X-Files, the 4200, Lost, and tons and tons of other stuff.  In fact, there are probably more shows that have been killed by this concept than not over the last few decades.  "The Truth is Out There".  What we see is a repeated impulse by writers of science fiction to just offer up a bunch of mysteries to hook the audience in with no regard really to whether the story needs a mystery or how the mystery relates to the story or even how they are going to resolve the mystery.  They know that they can hook audience though and create a fanbase that is waiting for the payoff, and that they don't ever need to give the payoff.   And TFA just reeks of this technique - all the flashbacks, and the mysterious references, and so forth.   It's all garbage.  They'll eventually come up with some quasi-explanation for everything, maybe, but it's clear that there is not a lot going on.  Even the title suggests that - "The Force Awakens".   Well, in no real meaningful sense did the force awaken in the story.  None of the 'twists' in TFA ever really were big pay offs, because we'd seen secret revealed family members before and we had to be expecting that.  And heck, we'd seen the wise old mentor die 2/3rds of the way into the movie as well.   Instead of seeming like a really cool story was going on, it just seemed like a lot of unnecessary head games were being played with the audience by writers that hadn't yet really decided on what they were going to do, and needed to pretend they had a big reveal to keep you interested.Compare the way the Vadar/Luke twist was handled.  Heck, compare how solidly a skilled story plotter like JK Rawlings handles her mysteries. TFA was just plan bad writing in the big picture, never mind the huge plot holes and lapses of internal logic.  And that doesn't even get into the thematic elements that are really the worst part of the movie.</blockquote>

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