ST JJ Abrams to direct Episode VII

He's a decent actor, I'd be fine with him.
Even though Tudors were a boring soap opera, the actors were rather good.

 

Into Darkness was fun enough, but man, if "faster and more intense" sums up any director it's Abrams. The guy makes Sonic the Hedgehog look like something from Henry James. Slow it down a bit for Star Wars. And a little less derivative action scenes as well, please.

 

That’s what does concern me slightly. I’m very happy with the appointment of Abrams, however, let’s be honest, the two newest Star Trek films are summer blockbusters. That’s what he specialises in. The Star Wars films have never been mere summer blockbusters (well, maybe the first film). They’ve always been a step higher than that. Yes, they’ve been blockbusters and they’ve all been released in the summer, but they’ve never followed the “blockbuster” formula. I don’t want Episode 7 to have more in common with Transformers than TESB, for example.

 

At least we know one thing....there probably wont be any dull, long boring political scenes that we all try to enjoy but fail to . JJ seems more like a "GO GO GO DONT STOP GOING!" type of person

 

star wars invented the "summer blockbuster"

 

I agree, thats definitely atleast one thing I feel we can count on.

Hoping all the potential government stuff is largely in the background and occasionally mentioned by Leia while Luke and his kids are busy causing me to geek out.

Abrams is an oldschool Star Wars fans so I'm hoping that means more heart (Solo and Skywalker children should add some interesting family dynamics) and adventure this time around.

Not that the prequels didn't try, Qui-Gon and Ben hopped around quite abit in Phantom Menace but it for some reason always felt like business as usual for them, I wasn't really feeling it.

 

Definitely, Star Wars is more like an Epic Greek poem (iliad and the odyssey) then an Hollywood action, science fiction film. I think JJ Abrams would do good to follow this qoute "its not about the destination but the journey" If Peter Jackson can make a 3 hour Hobbit movie that is spilt into 3 parts then Star Wars filmmakers should not be afraid to follow a similar formula. In short put the action on the back-burners and explore the Star Wars galaxy a little more.

 

Everyone will be fit in this movie because they will all be running and jumping the whole entire time.

 

Exploration is for Star Trek, and it's a fine thing, but Star Wars is glued together with one thing.

The action sequence.

 

Actually, one thing I love about Abrams two Trek flicks is the bullet-like pace of it. The characters have to go somewhere and BOOM! off they go with almost no breaks in between. I would say, aside from ANH (and, to be honest, they spend almost 40 minutes before they get off Tatooine) Star Wars movies aren't exactly the zippiest pace except for when things reach the third act. I'd love to see Abrams take that type of pacing where things start rolling near the end of act 1 (much like ANH) and then just go flat-out until the end. That would be a great thing that I think Abrams would be good at recapturing from the original flick.

 

Star Wars films are paced like Bond pictures: opening whiz-bang action sequence, followed by exposition and character intros, which then build towards a central action sequence followed by a breather, then a series of revelations which lead towards an extended action climax, and finally a resolution and denouement.

STID follows this same formula, but the exposition and character stuff is achieved in rapid-fire shorthand before an explosion or ballistic fire interrupts it. I expect Ep VII to slow this down a bit for some more in-depth characterization and world-building.

 

Heartily disagree. It's a super fast-paced action-adventure film. Its flaws include a bare-bones story that has little room to breathe. Its advantages include that it is extremely well-executed/filmed/edited/scored piece of cinema.

Abrams needs a solid script, which Arndt will doubtless deliver.

 

I hate it deeply but to each his own.

 

Fair enough, you're entitled to hate it. But IMHO the shot compositions, the arrangement of shots to tell the story visually, the use of music to heighten emotion, the vivid production design, the passionate realism of the actors' performances -- all of these elements of cinematic craft are par excellence in STID. You disliked the story, thought it was stupid, thought it should have played out differently, fine. But the execution of that story is superb.

 

I enjoyed it, as it's own thing. Not a model for Star Wars, certainly not. But I think Abrams realizes that....I hope

 

Actually, I really dug about STID how they would literally interrupt exposition with something exploding off screen or the scene where they uncover something plot-important they decided to fuse what could have been exposition by strapping live photo torpedoes to it. But the thing I enjoy about his flicks is the sense of speed (a subject that Lucas likes also, naturally), regardless of length of the movie, where they sort of just have the set up and then fly outwards from there. It all takes place over an extremely condensed period of time, which I like. Probably the closet you get in ANH post Tatooine (jump to Alderan and go forward from there. But even there's a similar thing with a small bit chunk of character between Luke & Leia & Han in the Falcon), and, oddly, Attack of the Clones where once they get to Tatooine it's a fairly zippy affair from that point onward.

 

as regards ST:ID, there were times I wanted to scream at spock to shut up with the inner exposition about his feelings etc. Seriously, sometimes less is more.

 

There is absolutely no internal consistency to any of the characters or plotlines in that film. Spock is a logical Vulcan unless he decides not to be; ditto everyone/thing else. Things "just happen" because they happen. As feeble as the PT scripts are at least the characters are consistent and the story unfolds logically, even small things like the little pendant Anakin gives to Padme play out in some way. I sincerely hope JJA doesn't interfere with Arndt's script too much. SW doesn't need to be "clever" it just needs to be good.

 

This is all my opinion & offered by way of barstool griping not argument! But I hated all of that myself. I would actually call JJA an "anti-visual" director with absolutely no sense of composition. None of his images convey any real narrative value, they're just designed things that were put on film, usually dead center frame. I could discern no story in ST:ID, none at all. There are several pointless overly complicated half baked plotlines intercut with each other, but none of them add up to anything at all. This is a movie that could have ended before it began if any of the characters had half a brain. The idea that this incarnation of you-know-who would be beholden to anyone is ridiculous - he could have thawed out his people, stolen that super ship & made alliances with the Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians and anyone else, within a few weeks or months & simply attacked Earth openly on some trumped up charge with a ton of faked "evidence" under the guise of a "preemptive strike" (not hard to do if he was flying around in a stolen Starfleet super warship!). Or simply put together his own rogue fleet of fanatical followers. Now that would have been a halfway decent premise for a space opera!

Visually JJA's films are like holding a flashlight up to your eyes & jumping up and down - whatever you see in your peripheral vision is pretty much what you get onscreen with JJA. The "emotion" in his films is created entirely by cheating the audience, there are little units of manipulative melodrama that he parcels into the film at moments of high action. They don't really connect with any other part of the film in any meaningful way. He doesn't heighten any existing emotion, he creates it artificially, giving characters scenes they haven't earned narratively and then exiting as quickly as possible so he doesn't have to deal with the messy business of creating an actual drama. The strongest dramatic scene in this film was lifted word for word from another movie! I think he's basically a shallow bag of tiresome tricks. I'm just hoping that under the influence of KK, DA & GL he can overcome these weaknesses and give us an E7 that does more than fizz, pop and manipulate our emotions.

 

I think Damon Lindelof is the worst of them all.