There's not a whole lot I can say about Star Wars: The Force Awakens that hasn't already been said, much of which amounts to "We know what we're in for." Unless there is some serious effort on J.J. Abrams's part to switch things up, it is safe to say with a certain degree of confidence that Star Wars Seven will be an incomprehensible mess of a plot set against the backdrop of great special effects, lens flare and space ships that go "Weeeeeee-wee we-we-we-we-we" for absolutely no freaking reason. And while I've never outright disliked anything Abrams has done, I wonder if it is more unfortunate that he was chosen to reboot both that and Star Trek.
Abrams claims that he never got into Star Trek because it was "too philosophical" and heaven forbid any length of entertainment media ask you to think about something. The original Trek had some action-y bits but was never the exercise in bombast that Star Wars was. Instead, Trek came from a future where everything was pretty chill: Earth was relatively safe and all. And if anything resembled an evil empire, it was the Federation itself, being an overly bureaucratic scientific/military exploration outfit with orders never to interfere with a developing species path and to shoot to kill. It made for a pretty interesting dichotomy that would be taken to the logical extreme in England's Blake's 7 (you're cool if you get it, and there may be more on that later).
Probably the biggest problem with Abrams's Star Trek is that he spent considerable effort turning it into Star Wars. Trek was never exactly known for its special effects and those were about all the new ones had going for them (lens flare obscures the graphics and allows them to age more gently, if you thought Abrams's crusade against epileptics everywhere was purely artistic) . They're enjoyable in that tasty-but-mostly-air chocolate wafer sort of way, but don't offer much the way of substance or originality, and feel like they've been written not as homage to the original or as a way to expand the source material, but to smear a fresh coat of plaster over the charming but weather-worn original. Family revenge story, check. Thinly veiled allusions to 9/11 and ripped-from-the-headlines global terrorism, got it. Snidely claiming to be clever by reversing Spock and Kirk's roles whilst keeping the story intact, why the hell not? But perhaps the worst part of Trek 2.0 is Zoe Saldana as Uhura, doing Nichelle Nichols's legacy no favors by turning the legendary character into a thermonuclear blast of hotness whose personality can be summed up with the phrase, "Bitches, right?" I haven't seen her in enough roles to judge the performance but there is a total lack of chemistry between her and Zachary Quinto, and more importantly the script fails the character - Guardians of the Galaxy did the same thing. And in the case of classic Star Wars, it only took six hours of movie and a fan base to get Princess Leia chained to the floor in a metal bikini.
In this light, Abrams makes a sort of worthy successor to Lucas, who plastered over his own movies with the "enhanced" DVD reissues. Everyone who cares the slightest bit about Star Wars remembers "Han Shot First!" but among other added scenes are some cute animated desert critters because apparently Ewoks screen tested so well all the movies needed to pander to the 8-12 demographic, a needless expository bit with Han and Jabba that's so badly made one wonders if it an animator threw it together two hours before cleaning out his desk, and replacing the physical models in the Death Star battle with animated ones. Writing dialog that explains the over complicated plot to the audience the way a second grade teacher explains the rain cycle is pretty much mandatory for any movie costing over a million bucks, and Abrams follows suit. The original Star Trek, being all think-y and stuff, never talked down to its audience the way even classic Star Wars does. Nor did it greatly over-simplify several thousand years of Eastern religious philosophy and grind it down into bullshit pop-psychology peppered with Bible references.
The closest Abrams has come to breaking out of his mold was Super 8, but he fails on the front of originality. As much as I liked that one, it really is just E.T. cranked up to 11. And while it seems like Abrams is trying to get Star Wars out of the massive dent its left in the couch from too many years of laziness and microwaved mac-and-cheese dinners (casting a black guy and a woman in leading roles is a start for the what may amount to the whitest cinema institution this side of Birth of a Nation), his work with Super 8 reveals a fundamental inability to think for himself and willingness to jack someone else's movie up on steroids.
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I am looking forward to Rogue One, the first of two planned spin-offs much more than any of the core series. The story is said to take place just before A New Hope and chronicle how the Death Star plans get into the hands of the rebellion and has been handed to Gareth Edwards. I'm not going to say that Edwards is a better director than Abrams, but his two movies have shown he can work within the constraints of self-produced indie film and big budget Hollywood with little loss of quality.
Edwards first movie, 2010's Monsters, is a goddamned masterpiece that blends an interesting take on alien invasion with a serious-if-unintentional discussion of immigration, mashed together with a love story that never feels forced or that it doesn't belong. 2014's Godzilla reboot ups the Hollywood dumb factor a little, but as I said that is practically a requirement. Even still, Godzilla is about the closest thing to a proper homage to the full breadth of the King of Monsters' tenure - from city-stomping wrath of nature to unwitting protector of mankind. It isn't the only attempt to make a direct sequel to the 1954 original, but it is the best, and that it took sixty years to get it right says a lot.
Edwards has a number of advantages over Abrams. In terms of graphics, he is better with scale (making things appear a correct, consistent or believable size with animation is extremely difficult; just pay close attention to the new Star Treks). And my hope is that he will remain unconstrained from filling the human roles with relateable cardboard cutouts with who the audience is supposed to identify. The heroes of Monsters, for example, and not particularly likable people but you root for them anyway, and it makes their internal journey as important as the external. Plus, critically, he knows how to hold back: Godzilla takes an hour to show up and the tell-tale roar is that much louder for it.
And maybe that is the entire problem with the Abrams brand of movie: nothing is held back. Chris Taylor's book "How Star Wars Conquered the Universe" reveals that, even toward the final draft, A New Hope was a very different movie. Some of the effects had to be improvised or scrapped altogether to fit within the budget and deadline - not to mention Lucas's multiple rewrites after getting called on lifting entire scenes from Lord of the Rings, and I get the feeling Lucas never quite got over those slights and has been working to rebuild the initial vision ever since. Nowadays, almost anything with the ubiquitous bubble-letter logo with sell out overnight, and graphics have come to the point that whatever can't be filmed can be animated. A director's head can almost literally be opened and put up on the screen, and there's no reason for anyone aboard to say, as someone probably said to George, "Hey boss, we can't afford that."
In fact, many of the tricks of low-budget became standard practice before the age of animated everything. Think Halloween's spraypainted William Shatner mask, Alien's slow build and relative lack of aliens, or running a camera backwards for intense chase scenes in Evil Dead.
Abrams might be a veteran of the special effects field, but that's precisely the thing that can get one in trouble next to a director like Edwards, who made Monsters on a scant (by Hollywood standards) $500,000. Throwing a black guy and a woman into the spotlight for the new main movie is nice and all, but comes across as a little heavy-handed from Abrams. Remember that bit in Star Trek: Into Darkness when Alice Eve took her clothes off for no reason? Not exactly utilizing female cast members in really creative ways to get the most out of the dramatic potential there, bro.
The final problem, and this extends to both movies, is that you pretty much like or dislike Star Wars as much as you're going to already. Franchise movies have that problem and this is no exception. At least Rogue One has a little more wiggle room out of the gate, until it's inevitably overshadowed by the second spin-off by Jurassic World's Colin Trevorrow, and if the latter is any indicator there will be a written test following the feature to make sure you got the plot. At least we'll get to find out who those Bothans were...
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