You all say JJ Abrams never closes stories
Didn't he close Super 8? I thought he did.
I actually enjoyed the first 3rd of super 8, but the last act was a real mess.
shareYeah, it definitely fell apart.
shareTypical JJ.
shareThe movie was just not good.
His love of lens flare ruined good scenes. Elle Fanning's speech at the train station should've been a great moment for the actress but her face was obscured by a huge, distracting lens flare. I'm sure had it been an adult actress, she would've let JJ know what a jerk move that was. But being a teen actress I'm sure she felt she couldn't say anything.
I remember thinking "Is it a monster movie? Is it a coming of age movie? Is it a nostalgia movie? Make up your mind and decide which movie you wanna make, JJ. All these disparate pieces can't work together." Then I saw Stranger Things and realized they could work together, you just need someone who knows what they're doing.
Oh GOD, the lens flares. I'd totally forgotten.
So Rian Johnson loves to subvert expectations, and JarJar Abrams loves to lay mystery boxes and blind viewers with lens flares.
Just for once, can we have directors in charge of big movie franchises who DON'T have such annoying and polarising eccentricities?
atm, Russo brothers are the best.
shareExactly my thoughts. It didn't know whether it wanted to be ET or 'It' and ended up in this weird no mans land.
I honestly do not know how JJ has done it. The guy has risen to the absolute pinnacle of his industry, directing the relaunches of not one but two of the most beloved franchises in history and yet he's yet to make any film that isn't fundamentally flawed in some way. I can not think of anybody in history, in any field; music, sport, or politics that been given so much on the back of so little. He's obviously technically competent, and he does seem to get nice performances from his cast but his films and stories... it's like he's never actually *seen* a film before, he's just analysed how they're made and then attempts to replicate the process. They're the cinematic equivalent of the uncanny valley.
JJ has most definitely failed upward.
He was obviously a fan of Speilberg and Lucas when he was a kid. And both of them had influences too. But when they made movies, they took their influences and molded it into something new. George wanted to make Flash Gordon in a Saturday morning serial type way. He took that germ of an idea and put it together with the monomyth/heroe's journey as well as melding it with other influences and made something new. JJ's movies are so derivative that they are basically fan films on a large budget.
It's like if the big studios designed an AI/algorithm to pump out films, JJ's would be the result. They have this inherent fakeness to them, a nice shiny product that manipulates you into feeling a certain way, like a slick con artist. Uncanny valley is a good description. A robot pretending to be human and almost succeeding.