It’s sort of interesting, because when you’re 20, 5 years *is* an incredibly long time, SW Ep
IX would feel an eternity ago to you, most people don’t read credits and JJ Abrams is a) quite shit and b) really shit at actually getting things made rather than just announcing them.
Oh completely; and maybe Gracie is better than her Dad in her chosen field? Although the sudden decision being a nepo baby doesn’t matter in this instance / because you don’t know adds extra hilarity. Also, we *are* basically 50. I think that’s fair enough.
One of the problems with pop culture currently is a bunch of people our age insisting younger people should care about the things we did when we were kids (eg Ghostbusters)
I watched this interview Reitman did with Adam Savage about how doing Frozen Empire was him trying to recreate how he felt sitting on set for the first movie and it was such a perfect encapsulation of the problem.
The problem with Abrams is pretty well summed up in his Ted Talk. The mystery box is an okay place to start, but it's hard (for him at least) to tell a satisfying story without a resolution.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjV...
I was going to say, the entire notion that every story has to be a puzzle to solve is fallacious to begin with. And IMO, responsible for some of the worst aspects of current fan culture.
nobody has ever been more sabotaged by this than poor old Rian Johnson, who did a terrific job of salvaging what he could from JJ's empty mystery box plotting and was then pilloried for not producing what a bunch of fans had convinced themself must have been inside all along
somehow Palpatine returned. Somehow there's yet another Death Star. Somehow we have to get these characters from A to B so we have to do yet another plot point based around finding a lost map.
Every time I see, “TLJ sidelined Finn!”, I’m like, are we talking about the same character? Who was given no real development *at all* in the prior film, and mostly existed to play a cynical bait & switch marketing gimmick? and now has his own plot about heroism & self-sacrifice?
the flaw in TLJ is the Canto Bight section, which is pure plot wheel-spinning while the Jedi stuff plays out, and that's Finn's bit. So I can see the argument - nothing he does in this movie is really important or consequential - but he does, as you say, now have a character arc of some kind
"What if the way the lost map works is by going to a special location with a map-finding object!"
"You mean like in Raiders of the Lost Ark?"
"No! This will be a serrated knife blade!"
"A knife blade... in a universe where the iconic gadget is a laser sword."
1/2
"And you stand on a cliff and match the edge to a shape on the horizon!"
"So this doesn't work if you're tall. Or short. Or standing 3' to the left."
"And the shape is the ruin of the Death Star in the ocean of Endor!"
"You mean it's collapsing. Into the waves... I'm gonna need to drink."
2/2
I blame JJ Abrams and his contemporaries for the current poison that is "spoiler culture." I have people commenting on shit I write saying it's a spoiler to share movie news or trailers and I feel bad for people who will never get to experience an actual plot or characters.
Yes, that’s what I mean, treating every piece of media like it’s a puzzle to solve instead of an emotional experience to have is very bad. “Rosebud” just being a sled isn’t remarkable; it’s the journey to understanding why that would be a dying wealthy man’s final words that matters.
It actually just hit me that his mystery stuff (Brick, Knives Out, Glass Onion, Pokerface) Johnson is still better at actual "mystery box" drama than Abrams is. Because he understands that investment in the mystery comes from the characters, *not* the puzzle pieces.
Part of it is, I think, an overreaction to the 1990s when fans worked out the foreshadowing in some stories and *told each other* in a place (the internet) that the creators could see. Instead of patting themselves on the back for getting the foreshadowing right, they panicked.
It’s a good approach for running a tabletop RPG (because you should go with the grain of what will most have resonance with your players’ belief about what is in the mystery box). Sad really that he missed out on his true calling.
I think that gives him too much credit tbh! In that situation you're trying to create a satisfying answer for the players, even if it isn't what you initially intended. He's not interested in the answer, just the illusion there is one.
He and Moffatt both have this problem
with long-form storytelling. They can throw in all kinds of interesting ominous portents and head-scratching complex foreshadowing. But they always, always blow the reveal in an almost offhand passing manner, as if they’d lost interest by the climax of the story
In a one or two episode arc, yes. But in every seasonal one in Who the buildup was everything and we literally had to rewind to catch parts of the final explanation.
He’s great at dialogue and humor though, apart from having a really unfortunate archaic view of gender roles.
It is! I ran a Mage game for folks who’d read every single book in every game of the setting, and suddenly throwing in stuff from Delta Green instead worked amazingly well.
It's certainly possible to create a good show if you don't know where it will end when you start. But if you present yourself explicitly as a mystery, you are promising something that needs to be delivered (even if it's not in the form that might be expected, and doesn't have to be ALL the answers)
Totally. I added the caveat "(for him)" specifically because this can be done to great effect across any story telling medium. He's just bad at it. Judging from the ted talk and his 4 year old unopened toy, because denouement doesn't interest him.
Yep, and the STAR WARS trilogy is an epic example.
JJ: Who is Rey? Where did she come from?? Who are her parents???
Rian Johnson: Maybe none of that matters? Maybe it’s just the choices we make here and now?
JJ: NO! Rey is the Emperor’s GRANDDAUGHTER!!!
The entire audience: Oh. Okay. I guess.
One of the reasons Abrams stuff feels empty is that the shape of the story around the mystery is important.
Lost felt like a story with a center being revealed until it ended. The backlash was because it felt weirdly betraying to realize that they didn’t know what they were hinting at either.
Yep. Once I watched that I understood exactly why his work suffers the way it does. Whereas I think eg Lindelof has gone a long way to improving on his earlier flaws.
