The Disappointing Career of JJ Abrams

[Applause] Captain Midnight this video is brought to you by brilliant Star Wars the rise of Skywalker is a movie from 2019 that I didn't really like at all I think I made a video way back when about Finn in that film where I was really harsh on it it is in my humble and probably not all that controversial opinion the worst Star Wars movie ever made years later though I also realized it's had another impact one which probably way fewer people care about but does bother me how it has completely monopolize the conversation around director JJ Abrams Star Wars is such a giant beloved series and Rise of Skywalker was such a shockingly incompetent finale to the new Trilogy that in many circles it seems to be the beginning and the end of the conversation around Abrams now now on one level this is pretty fair but on another I find it really boring especially as someone who has invested far too much time and interest in this guy's career so this week I wanted to take a long view of the career of JJ Abrams that goes beyond his biggest Blockbusters acknowledging what's gone wrong and why and ultimately I want to retain a little bit of hope that he could still create some interesting work in the future first I want to say that the digital edition of my comic binary SE is available right now on Amazon and kindall unlimited check out that link down below and and give it a review if you can it really feels like notable bigname directors are right now kind of older than they've ever been as the original mid-budget film has disappeared it's become harder and harder for younger directors to become household names sure there are some but still like Spielberg is 77 soresi is 81 James Cameron is turning 70 soon the director of furiosa George Miller is 79 and it's in this environment that I think it's easy to think of JJ Abrams as a young director but Abrams is turning 58 this year I don't bring this up to disparage him or anything obviously there's nothing wrong with being 58 but I think it puts his directorial career in a bit of a sad context because this is a guy who has been at the very top of the Heap in Hollywood since the early 2010s in a position that most directors could only dream of and yet you look at the list of movies he's directed and it's five giant franchise sequals and Super Eight an ODed to Steven Spielberg and80s kids movies now I do like some of those movies I'm a bigger fan of Mission Impossible 3 than most Mission Impossible fans I know I have my issues with Star Trek 2009 as someone who really loves Trek I made a whole video about it once but I still enjoy the movie and Super Eight is charming and at this point probably even a bit underrated and force awakens is I don't know fine I guess but for someone who has had so much pull in the film industry for so long I think it's fair to look at that list and think really like this is all you wanted to make nothing more personal more your own I mean just look at his Idol by the time Spielberg was JJ Abrams age he'd stretched his legs pretty far beyond just action Blockbusters he'd already made movies like Schindler's List Empire of the Sun AI artificial intelligence and was about to direct Munich he wasn't just doing movies like Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade felberg still returns to those large scale family-friendly Blockbusters occasionally but he never confined himself to that and even if he did want to stay in that arena for the Long Haul and I would understand that I do love Indiana Jones those movies were created by Him and George Lucas it wasn't just doing someone else's Vision forever say what you will about Zack Snyder but something like Rebel moon for whatever its flaws is a massive swing an attempt for Snider to establish his own mythology and create cre his own world and characters Super Eight is the only attempt to do anything like that in Abram's film work and to be fair I think it's a fairly successful one but it's also really by the numbers when I look at his filmwork I'm pretty let down by Abrams and his seemingly highly calculated aversion to taking on any project that's a risk something that I think in the long term has really hurt his career and I know that that's the JJ Abrams that most are thinking of when they hear his name but I must say that's just not really the case for me television will always be the medium I most associate with Abrams he had some screenwriting credits on movies like regarding Henry and gone fishing in the 9s but it's TV where he really made his name JJ Abrams would eventually become known for his use of lens Flair and his Mystery Box approach to storytelling the latter of which he really actively fostered with things like his Ted Talk and his strange 2013 book experience s but you wouldn't know that by looking at his first show Felicity which premiered in the fall of 1998 on the WB and honestly though Felicity is far from perfect I think Abrams would benefit from returning to its far more grounded storytelling at some point down the line starring Carrie Russell who he'd later work with again in Mission Impossible 3 and co-created by Matt Reeves who would go on to direct the Batman Felicity is for most of its run about as far from the bombast of their future project projects as you can get on a surface level it's really hard to see much of any connection between this coming of age College set show and his later work but I do think it's very much there the show centers on Felicity Porter a teen who moves across the country to attend a very NYU like college in New York City there's the guy she has a crush on when she moves there Ben played by Scott Speedman and her dorm ra null played by Scott Foley soon a love triangle develops all wall Felicity deals with the trials and tribulations of being new to college and to the city if this all sounds incredibly basic well that's because it is for much of its run Felicity is a very grounded show if you grew up on like Euphoria this version of the Teen drama may feel completely foreign to you it's incredibly Earnest incredibly '90s bathed in the warm glow of gazy cinematography and wall-to-wall soft rock with yearning and heartbreak set appropriately to Sarah mlin song about love and if that all sounds boring to you I'm going to be honest it probably will be and yet I find a lot to like in Felicity it's small Stakes it's Nuance lead performances and it's often very effective writing and it's infelicity where we find the first real example of the type of JJ Abrams lead he would go back to again and again the quiet introverted young woman trying to find her way in the world now one of the stranger aspects of Felicity is in its final season which baffled audiences at the time and gave a clear indication of where Abram's interests would lie in the future in the final batch of episodes Felicity becomes something of a magical time travel show with our lead seen how our choices play out in multiple timelines it's a really odd ending for this show but it makes perfect sense in the context of the kinds of Storytelling that would go on to Define Abrams later Alias his spy show from 2001 starring Jennifer Garner was a minor hit for a few seasons and eventually led to his gig on mission impossible as Tom Cruz was apparently very impressed with what he saw now these days in the age of extremely bloated streaming TV budgets Alias may look a bit cheap but for 2000's Network TV it was very noted for being cinematic and Slick it takes a lot of what worked in Felicity the Heartbreak the lead having to navigate her love life and her dreams the sad montages set to Sarah mcglaughlin but added in a heavy dose of Espionage action and crucially a mystery box Supernatural mythology which weaved its way through The Narrative of the show and here's where we get to a very controversial element of Abram's career he sets things up well and is generally not very good at taking them anywhere lost is often cited as an example of this but in that case it's just not true as Abrams was never the showrunner but they've kind of got him dead to wrs on Alias the rambaldi mysteries in Alias which involv these ancient and mystical artifacts the show often uses as mcguins never adds up to much of anything and mostly serves as an easy way for Abrams and Company to push the supernatural heightened stories into where he wants the audience heads space to be for these emotionally charged moments with no real care for their greater significance in the long term it's really effective at times providing the series with some very high Highs but the longer it runs the more you get that Wizard of Oz sense where where there's a lot of smoke and mirrors to cover for any real lack of a point to this mythology or definitely any sense of how to wrap it up now I think this is fairly forgivable for a show like Alias to be honest where that stuff mostly just served to facilitate interesting twists and turns for the character's relationships it's a bigger issue when it becomes the thing Abram starts hanging his hat on still I do like Alias and I love the pilot of lost which he directed in the case of lost I think showrunners Damon Lindelof and and Carlton Q's were able to piece together a mythology and world that's incredibly emotionally engaging thematically rich and complex and fairly satisfying in the end I know many would disagree and yes it is all pretty convoluted but I don't think there's nearly as many unanswered questions as its detractors like to claim and the conversations around its finale tend to simplify the episode in ways that kind of drive me nuts to be honest maybe someday I'll talk about that at length but it's not really relevant in here because Abrams was just not the one making the decisions at that point he simultaneously gets too much credit and too much blame for lost in many ways it's the ideal JJ Abrams project something he can start off on a really good foot and then leave before he has to figure out what to do with any of the pieces that he put on the board still I think you can see some of the personal touches of Abrams in those early episodes early on in production the character of Jack was supposed to die in the pilot with Kate taking on a more Central role than she ultimately ended up playing you can see traces of that in the very Kate heavy pilot and she's a classic Abrams lead highly internal and conflicted like Sydney Bristo and Felicity Porter before her but all of Abram's worst Tendencies the empty Mystery Box storytelling and the Reliance on these big moments to carry emotional weight that don't really hold up to scrutiny after the fact seem to only be encouraged by big Blockbuster film making while many of the things that I did like about him the dorky earnestness the grounded relationships and the exploration of Fairly repressed people faded into the background leaving us with a filmmaker it's hard to feel too passionate about either way so what would I like to see from Abrams well definitely not this Hot Wheels brand movie that he's been attached to but thankfully that doesn't seem to be going anywhere what I'd really like to see is him return to TV this will probably seem really out of left field but there was a show on HBO from like 27 to 2020 called room 104 that never garnered much attention it was from the duplass brothers and its premise was really simple every episode was set in the same rundown motel room some episodes it would be this like small scale character piece or relationship drama other times it would be a strange Twilight Zone esque genre show it was wildly uneven but I thought the great episodes were something special I'd really love to see something like that from JJ Abrams something that lets him tell these intimate relationship stories alongside some weirder episodes that indulge his Mystery Box instincts whatever it is though I do want to see it on a smaller scale something that's less reliant on flash and bombast I just 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Channel: captainmidnight

Views: 223,436

Keywords: JJ Abrams, Star Wars, TROS, Rise of Skywalker, Star Trek, Lost, Alias, Felicity, Captain Midnight, captainmidnight, Into Darkness, review, commentary

Id: 7lzht3Tr9GE

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024