Hera wrote:
I think the best review of Star Trek JJ did is that i would be a passable Sci Fi if it wasnt labeled Star Trek. Not awful but not great. But adding the Star Trek brand to it actually dragged it down since it broke so many additional 'rules' to the setting.
Not even that. With high-school bad photography (lense flares), abysmal scenario (the quantity of coincidences in this story is staggering and crude scripting to force things to happen a certain way regardless of logic) utterly ridiculous villain (a miner from the future goes to the past with a supership and waits 25 years to destroy the planet of the guy who risked his own life and against orders to save his homeworld), cutting and editing blunders (the Kelvin captain goes down in the turbolift... to the shuttlebay which is on top of the ship) and scaling errors (ENT shuttlebay anyone?) the like of which was last seen in King Kong (the 1933 one...), this movie is bad enough as a movie...
But when you go into the sci-fi aspect, it gets even worse; high school drop-out understanding of science (flying through a black hole...), absurd future engineering (a baywindow on starship bridges, boilers and pipes as in a WWII freighter ship engine room, drilling and mining from orbit...), utter confusion between time travel and dimensional travel, magical "red matter" as a main plot device (which works inconsistently to boot), impossibly fast warp travel (16 ly in minutes)... Even as a sci-fi movie (which is often used as an excuse to give some leeway to mediocre movies) it fails in a most epic way.
With Star Wars, Abrams will avoid all that, simply because the Star Wars saga is NOT a Sci-Fi saga at all; it is a Samurai saga, just set in the setting and trappings of Sci-Fi; all the concepts (like the Force = Ki), ideas (a young country boy learning to become a warrior to save a princess kidnapped by an evil Lord corrpupted by an Evil Emperor-Sorceror, not knowing she is his sister and the Lord his father), the main tech (lightsaber=katana), the characters (Jedi = Samurai, Sith = Ronin), everything is the same as in a classic Japanese Kurosawa movie (of which Lucas told explicitely that he is a fan of and took his inspiration from). There is no scientific question, no projection of our societies into the future, no study of human behavior in out-of -this world situations, no pondering of our nature and that of life, technology etc no look back at our current world from a far away perspective, no "what if". In other words, no Sci Fi at all. Only the looks of it.
Star Wars is let's have fun with space monsters, zap guns and zooming spaceships, heroes and villains with cool futuristic-looking gadgets clashing for the simple idea of good vs evil, in the same style as those exciting samurai flicks of old.
Abrams then can certainly make a fun, exciting Star Wars movie.
