• Stamets@lemmy.worldM
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    11 months ago

    I completely get what he was trying to say. He wanted to make a movie where the massive Trekkies were happy but people like him were happy but fuck me if this wasn’t tone deaf to all hell. I’d say stay behind the camera but honestly stick to writing instead. Fringe was great and so was Lost before it went head over heels. There was another show of his called Alcatraz that was also pretty great. But the franchise movies are very miss-heavy for most people. I like the Kelvin movies but it’s for what they are, not because they’re necessarily great Trek movies.

    • gregorum@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      i agree. the Kelvin films were, technically speaking, popular, crowd-pleasing films. But they were terrible Trek films, devoid of everything that makes Trek Trek. Trek was never meant to be “sci-fi boom-boom action-adventure idiots is space,” but that’s what JJ wanted, and we got 3 films like that. And his audition for George Lucas bagged him 2 Star Wars films, because, c’mon, that’s what it was really all about anyway.

      and they were terrible Star Wars films, too. Popular and crowd-pleasing, but terrible.

      • Yamainwitch@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        To his credit, JJ did such a terrible job that it chilled out a lot of the more hostile Star Wars fans and gave us a common enemy lol

      • Kbin_space_program@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        TFA wasn’t bad. Some of the characters were completely wasted(read: Finn) and it was a retread of a new hope, but it was decent.

        • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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          11 months ago

          Kirk and Uhura are caricatures, Spock isn’t anything like Spock, and the plot borders on parody. It’s like Orville but not funny.

      • 520@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        TFA was not a terrible star wars film, even for star wars fans. Highly derivative of A New Hope, yes, but many star wars fans were longing for something akin to the original trilogy after the prequel trilogy was… controversial to say the least, and it genuinely seemed like a great place to start.

        Rise of Skywalker? Whole 'nother story.

    • NegativeNull@lemm.ee@lemm.eeOP
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      11 months ago

      Given the modern state of the movie industry, I understand the desire to make movies with a broader appeal. That was his job. Economics trumps all other considerations.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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        11 months ago

        Sure, but I think you can go for broader appeal and also be philosophical. I think a perfect Trek example is The Best of Both Worlds, which managed to be philosophical about what it means to be human while featuring plenty of pew pew space battle.

        EDIT: Also, I think Barbie proved you can make real points about the defects of modern society even with movies that have the broadest appeal possible.

    • Hyperreality@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      I honestly wonder how much control he actually had over the franchise or blockbuster movies he’s made.

      Eg. The Sundance to Blockbuster Franchise pipeline is a well known thing in the industry. They farm talent for their latest franchise movie.

      They don’t actually give the directors they hire much (if any) artistic freedom. The movies are far far too expensive to take risks like that. They simply need the name for on the poster, to give their McDonalds movie a veneer of artistic credibility.

      It’s sad, because young talent thinks they’re being offered a great opportunity, when in reality they’re being whored out. The large studios know they’re too inexperienced to offer much pushback and that they can pay them less than they’re worth because ‘exposure’.

      Obviously JJ is a big name, but I assume he also spends all day fighting with the producers and the studio when making a big movie like this. Or he doesn’t and he basically represents the studios, a bit like that Mitchell and Webb “Are we the baddies?” sketch. I dunno.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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      11 months ago

      I hate that he’s absolutely obsessed with “red mercury” and puts it in everything including Star Trek.

      • Kyle@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Like Ridley Scott and milk android or machine-blood. But he only makes original things so he gets a pass.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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        11 months ago

        In Star Trek Magazine issue 144, Scott Chambliss, production designer on Star Trek, noted that the appearance of red matter as a “big red ball” was a reference to other productions that he had worked on with J.J. Abrams, including Alias and Mission: Impossible III.

        https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Red_matter

        It was called Red Mercury in Alias and Red Matter in Star Trek and I didn’t see Mission: Impossible III. The point is it’s a big red ball of stuff and he keeps putting it in his shows and movies.

      • shea@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        11 months ago

        i couldn’t find a single source for this on Google, with multiple different word combinations and arrangements. would you please explain what you’re talking about?

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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          11 months ago

          In Star Trek Magazine issue 144, Scott Chambliss, production designer on Star Trek, noted that the appearance of red matter as a “big red ball” was a reference to other productions that he had worked on with J.J. Abrams, including Alias and Mission: Impossible III.

          https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Red_matter

          It was called Red Mercury in Alias and Red Matter in Star Trek and I didn’t see Mission: Impossible III. The point is it’s a big red ball of stuff and he keeps putting it in his shows and movies.

    • chunkystyles
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      11 months ago

      Where, IMO, a good story should start with some idea of where it’s heading. Maybe not initially, but at least at the broad strokes stage of creating a story.

  • Yamainwitch@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    LENS FLARE! Fringe is one of my all time favorite shows and it’s interesting that he thinks Trek is “too philosophical” when I see a lot of the same human questions and boundary pushing there just set on Earth/Earth 2. LENS FLARE! This guy also highly recommend the two (sloppy, ham-fisted, likely heavily aided by/written by chatgpt) writers of Rings of Power, even though he rejected their script. LENS FLARE!

    Edit: **not written or aided by chatgpt, just objectively terrible writing and I’m sorry to the bots for my assumptions about your generative skills

      • Yamainwitch@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        It just seems like the quality of writing is on par with something that an AI would generate as there was absolutely no real substance whatsoever which, to me, came across as written by a bot. I didn’t realize chatgpt was released after RoP so it’s obviously not written by it, but the script was so bad I thought it could not possibly be written by a living breathing person who understands words but hilariously I’m wrong and now I can’t get the image of these two guys typing word by word into a thesaurus to write.