JJ Abrams: Wrong Choice for Star Wars

Your wrong. Lost was an amazing show. People kept on tuning in season after season to unravel the mystery of the island. The Star Trek films have also been better than I would have expected. Not many people can do mystery as well As J J Abrams.

For Star Wars they were looking for someone with the same spirit in their stories and the way they tell that story. Your director choices are not very fitting. You should have listed directors like Robert Zemikis, Ron Howard and Stephen Spielberg if you were looking for continuity between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. J.J. Abrams was my first choice even before they announced a director.

JJ Abrams would have been a passable choice as director. However, these films are 50% concept, 30% screenwriting, 20% filmmaking. Remember, the original trilogy had a great concept, incredible background story and great universe/myth behind it, which was later cheapened by the prequels, and you have to thank (or blame later) George Lucas. George Lucas spent years developing the concept for the original trilogy. What scares me is JJ Abrams was responsible for concept and screenplay and direction. I hope to god Lawrence Kasdan had more influence in the final concept screenplay than Abrams. My list of directors are not choices, just director-screenwriters that are vastly better than JJ Abrams. With the exception that Guillermo Del Toro would have been a great choice for director, or Alfonso Cuaron. Fincher, Tarantino, Nolan are too idiosyncratic. Spielberg and Zemekis are too old school and this new Stars Wars should be made by the younger generation. As I said before, if Disney had any artistic integrity, they would have hired the best of the best create the concept, story and screenplay... in my opinion would be the Breaking Bad writing team. But alas, they are just out to make a quick billion.

Yeah, they should have chosen Uwe Bowl.

Spoiler: I'll reserve judgment until I actually see it on the 17th.

Good TV writing from a team does not equal good movie writing. And thematically "Breaking Bad" is the complete opposite of Star Wars. JJ Abrams will do a fine job. And he does have Kasdan as co-writer.

Agreed. The studio just wanted a big-name, safe choice for a director. They should have given it to someone like Christopher Nolan, but then again it's Disney and they'll want to turn it into a ride for kindergarteners.

Completely disagree. Look at Lawrence Kasdan who wrote Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, Continental Divide all back to back to back… you can’t think more different genre’s.. yet they are all great screenplays. The greatest thing about the original Star Wars trilogy is a sense of authenticity - even if the universe and premise is completely fictional and almost absurd – characters are very authentic. What the Breaking Bad writing team has demonstrated with Breaking Bad and confirmed with Better Call Saul is that they can formulate situations and characters that are very authentic. What is needed is a group of very intelligent people with good artistic sense, being able to work out the best possible scenario, flesh out interesting characters, write good dialog and infuse some humor – genre and premise is almost meaningless. They also have to have complete creative freedom without corporate overlords breathing down their necks. Problem with Hollywood is you got people with no artistic taste, who have MBA’s and Law Degrees, making artistic decisions and not giving good writers and directors opportunity to do their best work and Disney is one of the worst cases. They are also employing talentless hacks because of rampant favoritism and nepotism - I think you can put JJ Abrams on that list.

The last episode of Breaking Bad has two of the characters describing a hypothetical episode of Star Trek that will blow everyone's minds. The plot involved a pie eating contest and one of the contestants beaming the eaten pie from the stomach so they can eat more pie. In my mind, if that was an actual Star Trek episode, it’ll probably be one of the best Star Trek episodes out there.

Hmmm...Lost was a great show, especially the first season and mostly the second season.
I stopped watching the show around episode 7 of season 3.
Why?! Because I felt at that point, the show was really dragging on.
I had just too many questions that kept piling up with too few anwers / explanations given.
And the flashbacks started to irritate the hell out of me!

I don't know if I'm ever going to rewatch the show again.

Now, after the release of Star Wars: Episode IV-ish: A New Hope Awakens By Force, we can say that visually J.J. Abrams certainly is the right choice, but if we consider originality...pfff!