It's A Conspiracy! - A Brief History Of J.J. Abrams
Once upon a time, there was a writer named Jeffrey Abrams. In 1990, a film he wrote, Taking Care Of Business, was released in theaters. It's about a con artist (Jim Belushi) who assumes the identity of an uptight executive (Charles Grodin), and all of the hijinks that ensue. It's also awful. But hey, it was Jeffrey's first movie. Not everybody is going to write Citizen Kane the first time out of the gate. But Orson Welles, even at rock bottom, never wrote anything as bad as Taking Care Of Business.
Jeffrey's next screenplay became the 1991 Harrison Ford film Regarding Henry, about a douchebag lawyer who treats his family like dirt, until John Leguizamo shoots him in the head. Miraculously surviving the injury, Harry Ford re-learns how to walk, how to talk... and how to love his family. This film is also awful, only instead of being stuck with Jim "the wrong kid died" Belushi, we are left with Harrison Ford before he stopped caring. So it's a slight improvement.
So what was next for Jeffrey? Why Forever Young, of course! Have you ever seen this movie? The one where Mel Gibson plays a pilot in 1939 who is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in 1992, to discover that *gasp* everything has changed! Buck Rogers, this ain't. Is this movie awful? Surely, the third time must be the charm? Not quite. The movie, just like Jeffrey's previous work, feels inert. There's no substance on the page, nothing for an actor to really run with.
It seems pretty clear by this point that the man starts with a concept that he just absolutely falls in love with, then tries to write a screenplay around that concept, with no regard for realistic characterization or subtlety. Okay, so maybe the man has learned his lesson by now.
Jeffrey wasn't heard from again until 1997's Gone Fishin', a film reuniting the Lethal Weapon saga's Danny Glover and Joe Pesci as two mildly retarded pals who embark on the wackiest fishing trip of their lives. Their misadventures include wrecking a marina with a runaway boat, getting struck by lightning, burning down a classy hotel because Danny Glover is a sleepwalking arsonist, meeting Willie Nelson, outwitting a grumpy alligator, seducing young women with narcolepsy,and getting brutally tortured by a homicidal con artist. No, really. The third act briefly takes a really dark turn that seems completely out of place with all of the rather amiable shenanigans that make up the rest of the film.
Oh, the film is also really awful, easily the worst thing Jeffrey has written thus far. To be fair, he was not the only credited writer on this project, so perhaps Jeffrey just wrote a terrible fishing buddy comedy, then somebody else came aboard and added all of the anachronistic torture stuff. We may never know.
He also co-wrote 1998's Armageddon, but that film has so many credited writers to share the blame.
It was around this time that Jeffrey decided he'd be better off if he started calling himself "J.J.", I assume to help distance himself from the garbage he wrote in the past. He also created the television series Felicity, about a girl who follows her high school crush to college, according to the IMDB plot summary, "to be near him". That sounds like serious stalker behavior to me. I don't know a damned thing about Felicity, because I never watched it. It wasn't the type of program that held any interest for me.
It got good reviews, though, and it developed a vocal fan base. So vocal, that I remember hearing about a whole cross-section of fans raising a huge fuss after lead actress Keri Russell changed her hairstyle between seasons. What the fuck was that about?
I must confess to watching the final episode, however. Not because I wanted to. No, a thunderstorm briefly knocked the cable out, and I was stuck with the networks for one night. This night happened to be the same night that the series finale of Felicity aired on the WB. Of course, I had no idea what was going on, but I never heard anything about sorcery and time travel in relation to this program before.
But I did watch his next series, Alias, starring Jennifer Garner as a covert agent for the CIA. I liked the show well enough. It wasn't high art, but it was a fun diversion, with colorful characters and globe-trotting adventure. Until the program crawled up its own ass with its fixation on the life and works of a fictional Rennaisance-era supergenius named Rambaldi, at the expense of everything else. J.J. Abrams just had to ruin a decent-if-not-mindblowing espionage TV thriller with pointless sci-fi bullshit. But overall, I suppose it was a marked improvement over his previous work. At least I gave a damn about Sydney Bristow.
He also wrote the film Joy Ride, which I inexplicably enjoyed, despite being very, very dumb.
I'm not going to talk about the series Lost, because despite being listed as a co-creator, the series really belongs to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Also because fuck that show. I'm not going to talk about Fringe, either, because that series is really the baby of Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, and I don't watch it. I did watch the pilot episode of his latest TV creation, Undercovers, and I hated every minute of it. Apparently nobody else liked it either, because it was quickly and mercifully cancelled.
That leaves us with the man's return to the big screen, beginning with 2006's Mission: Impossible III, which many hail as the best cinematic outing of the fledgling franchise to date. I don't understand why that is. Mission: Impossible II was so unimaginably bad that anything would have looked good following up that atrocity. But there's nothing special about J.J. Abrams's movie.
Like his previous film work, the story and dialogue feel flat and lifeless, only this time because the man himself is directing, the whole endeavor feels like a TV movie, not a theatrical motion picture. It's the second best Mission: Impossible movie, but that means nothing considering its predecessor was an abject failure of a film.
Being a pretty big fan of Star Trek, especially the original series, I was understandably concerned when it was announced that J.J. Abrams would be directing a big budget reboot of the franchise, revisiting the familiar characters from the original 1960's program. Nothing I had seen from the man had given me any real confidence that he would make a good Star Trek movie, although I couldn't imagine the Abrams film could be worse than the theatrical outings of the Next Generation crew.
But I watched the Abrams film with an open mind, and came out happy. Sure, the absolutely ridiculous plot collapses like a soufflé under any scrutiny, and the lens flares can grow annoying, but the movie manages to nail the characters, the slick action keeps you from lingering on said ridiculous plot, and the bombastic musical score is great stuff.
It didn't feel like a TV movie. The Abrams Star Trek felt big, and it was a lot of fun. For the first time, Jeffrey had actually exceeded my expectations. What a thrill.
Now why did I just play This Is Your Life with J.J. Abrams? It seems to me that when Lost became some sort of pop culture phenomenon, Abrams was touted as the hip new guy on the scene in Hollywood, a man who became immediately associated with this "mystery box" kind of production around which his projects revolved. This is evident in what became (to its detriment) the all-consuming obsession with Rambaldi artifacts in his previous series Alias, with a host of tantalizing questions raised, forcing the audience to come along on this journey to see those questions answered.
Lost definitely followed this formula to an insane degree, with the showrunners promising time and time again that the questions driving their audience mad would eventually be answered.
Remember J.J.'s 2008 production Cloverfield? Of course you do. The film's entire marketing campaign was dedicated to this formula, creating a mysterious aura that surrounded this oddly titled motion picture. Something terrible is happening in New York City, but what is it? What could it possibly be? This campaign created some serious buzz for the film, and the viral marketing centered on some bizarre soft drink called "Slusho" really excited the hardcore internet nerds who live for shit like this.
What did "Slusho" have to do with anything in Cloverfield? The film's central protagonist is moving to Japan to work for a giant corporation that, among many other things, incidentally produces the "Slusho" soft drink. That's it. How let down were all of those people who followed the viral marketing campaign so closely, spending tireless hours on their computers, unlocking this amazing faux conspiracy, only to discover, after they watched the film a dozen times and read a few plot synopses online, that the "Slusho Connection" was complete bullshit?
I'm sure many of them had concocted elaborate stories in their heads about some evil corporation that accidentally creates an unstoppable monster through their careless experimentation with food additives, but none of that came to pass. There's no explanation as to where the monster came from, aside from a brief instance of something falling from the sky in the background of the final shot of the film, which is a flashback of sorts.
The filmmakers weren't interested in answering any of the questions they raised during Cloverfield's marketing campaign. They just made a mediocre "found footage" monster movie with truly unlikeable protagonists and a spindly, unimaginative monster that is seemingly stalking our "heroes" through the city of New York for no good reason.
I can debate the dubious merits of this film, but the marketing campaign was incredibly effective. It got people talking. Audiences wanted to figure out this big mystery, despite the fact that in the end there were no answers to be had.
This "hip new voice" is a 21-year Hollywood veteran who has been pumping out products with interesting, often rather strong premises that fizzle out because he doesn't have the necessary strengths as a storyteller to realize the potential of said premises. With Star Trek, he clearly grew as a director, allowing his actors to inhabit their characters and bring them to life, elevating the final product beyond its frankly terrible script.
But I don't know how much of this I can credit Abrams with, considering the iconic characters themselves have existed since 1966, and the talented cast had a vast well of television episodes and films to draw from in order to create their own versions of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc.
So the real test would be his next film, a "mysterious" Stephen Spielberg production called Super 8, which opened earlier this month.
Stop Saying "Mint"! - The Story Of Super 8
Super 8 is the story of a boy named Joe Lamb, growing up in the fictional town of Lillian, Ohio in the year 1979. His mother recently died in a horrific factory accident, made more tragic by the fact that at the time of her death, she was covering the shift of fellow factory worker and town drunkard Louis Dainard. Louis feels really guilty, and tries to alleviate his guilt through further drinking.
Joe and his father, Sherrif's deputy Jackson, deal with their grief by mostly staying out of each other's respective storylines, only briefly coming together over arguments about baseball camp and their mutual lack of understanding. Every time Jackson is in the same room as his son, he stares intensely at the boy and breathes heavily, looking less like a concerned parent and more like a deranged man on the edge of a violent breakdown.
But Joe doesn't have time for this bullshit. He's out and about with his buddy Charles, a chubby tyrant who thinks he's Orson Welles. Charles even looks like Orson Welles. It's a little creepy. He's in the midst of making a zombie epic called The Case with his school chums, working to complete his magnum opus in time to submit it to a prestigious local film festival. He manages to talk a real live girl named Alice, into playing the film's leading lady.
Alice just so happens to be the daughter of that cheery fuck Louis, and this creates intial tension between Alice and Joe. Actually, it creates initial tension on Alice's part, but Joe's such a laid back, well-adjusted fellow he just takes all of this in stride.
While filming a pivotal scene at a train station, the ragtag film crew catches sight of a pick-up truck on the railroad tracks, playing chicken with an oncoming train. A truly stupefyingly over-the-top derailment sequence ensues, with our plucky heroes narrowly dodging flying debris and massive explosions, walking away with nary a scratch between them. It defies belief, and feels like it belongs in a different movie.
After some... thing bursts out of one of the overturned railcars and disappears, the kids find the pick-up truck surprisingly intact, the science teacher from Gremlins behind the wheel. Shockingly not dead after driving headlong into a speeding train, he whips out a gun and warns the kids not to tell a soul about what they've seen tonight, otherwise their whole families will be murdered by the eeeeeviiiilll government, and the kids flee the scene moments before said government baddies arrive.
The rest of the film follows the adventures of the kids as they continue to shoot their film, using the increased military presence around town for added production value, Joe's burgeoning relationship with Alice, and the exploration of the eternal bonds of friendship in small-town America.
Oh, and every single dog in town runs away, but every other animal remains, oblivious to the danger that only the canines can sense.
Also, there's a spindly alien monster cruising through town, stealing power cables, microwaves and other small appliances in an effort to create a powerful magnetic field to draw in a massive collection of strange cubes collected by the military goons that, when gathered together, will do their Voltron thing and construct a spaceship that will finally take him back to his homeworld, thousands of light years away.
And it eats people.
Eventually, the alien wreaks vengeance upon the sinister military personnel who kept it caged for several decades, newly-appointed Sheriff Jackson and pathetic drunk Louis, who hate each other, arbitrarily kiss and make up just in time to not accomplish anything, and Alice gets kidnapped by the alien. Joe and his pal Terrormouth venture into the catacombs beneath the town to rescue his beloved, and are confronted by the alien on their way out.
Joe figures now is the time to lay some serious wisdom on the very pissed off alien monster before it decides to eat him, and basically says "shit happens, deal with it" in the nicest and stupidest way possible. The alien looks at Joe like he just farted, then confusingly lets the kids go, before turning on his nightmare microwave mountain, summoning THE CUBES to the water tower.
Everybody gathers in the middle of town for a happy reunion as the cubes gather, destroying the water tower and showering them all with debris as the alien's reconstituted ship takes off for the heavens, and we fade to black.
You Blew It! - Enraged Analysis
There is a good movie somewhere in Super 8, but ultimately it stands as a failure. The failure lies in the poorly realized and ultimately unnecessary and intrusive science fiction subplot. This movie didn't need an alien threat. It just didn't. Of course, the film could have still worked with the alien plot, but the poor execution ruins that possibility.
I can see the climax of the film trying to draw some sort of comparison between the maligned alien and Joe, both having to deal with serious pain in their lives, but it holds no water. Joe just lost his mother, and the alien has been enslaved and systematically tortured by the U.S. government for decades.
Nevermind the fact that while the alien is an angry thing, lashing out at innocent people and striking fear into an entire community, Joe is, as I mentioned earlier, a pretty well-adjusted young man who is dealing with the tragic death of his mother in a very healthy manner. He's not raging at the world, he's just trying to move on with his life.
Now maybe, you might argue, this is the point of the final interaction between Joe and the alien, that through Joe the alien learns how to live and let live, and in that moment it begins the slow healing process it's been denied for so long. But if that was the intention, then it's horribly fumbled by director J.J. Abrams, who has no grasp of subtlety. This occasion is the first and only time that anyone (including the audience) gets a good look at the alien, and we're supposed to make an emotional connection with it? It's a little hard to do that for three reasons.
1) The creature design is so unimaginative and nondescript, there's no emotional center to latch on to. It just looks like a big, wet thing. There's no "character" here.
2) This is the only moment in the film where we see the alien as anything more than a vague shape in the night snatching up terrified people around town. In order to create any emotional connection to the creature, the film needed to introduce it as a true presence much earlier in the film, long before the third act.
3) In this sequence, we are introduced to the alien as it nonchalantly devours some poor soul who never did anything to deserve such a grisly fate. It's a little hard to directly sympathize with such a creature, no matter how badly we're told the creature was treated in the past.
The majority of the film focuses on the relationships between Joe, his monster movie buddies, and Alice, but the third act throws all of that boring shit right out the window to allow the lazy sci fi bullshit to commandeer the plot. All of Joe's friends, aside from his pyromaniac buddy, are essentially forgotten at this point, so that Joe can have his big heroic moment in saving the damsel in distress.
The first half of this film depended on the relationship between these kids, and the climax sidelines almost all of them for no good reason. Apparently Abrams had no idea what to do with any of the other kids, and threw a bunch of sound and fury up on the screen near the end, hoping the audience would simply forget about the previous hour of the film.
And why did braceface have to be Joe's sidekick at the climax? Because he had fireworks? it would have much more thematic sense for Charles to be Joe's wingman at the end, because they both have a thing for Alice, and they're best friends, the core of their little group. Braceface could have given Charles the bag of fireworks and wished him luck, and the climax would have been at least a little stronger.
It's a shame the movie decided to run whole hog with the alien garbage, because there is some very strong emotional work in the first half, almost completely involving the kids. The relationships displayed felt genuine, and the child actors are almost uniformly great. That's really why Super 8 so completely let me down in the end. J.J. Abrams wrecked a very effective coming-of-age story with his typical "mysterious mystery" shit. He just couldn't help himself.
There didn't need to be an alien menace, here. It did nothing but destroy what could have been a fantastic, "Spielbergian" film about a tight-knit group of friends coming into their own while making a Super 8 movie one magical summer.
Joe still could have recently lost his mother. Louis could still be struggling with the intense guilt that is slowly eating away at him. Jackson could still be adrift in the world without his wife, trying to raise his young son alone while juggling his responsibilities as an officer of the law. The filming of Charles's horror movie could have been the catalyst for a reconciliation between Joe and Alice's fathers.
A subplot involving the film crew staging an alien invasion hoax for their movie could be used as an excuse to raise paranoia among some of the more superstitious townsfolk who saw "aliens" in a cornfield during the night, for example. Hell, the film could have made Charles a somewhat obsessed Orson Welles devotee who wants to recreate the man's infamous War Of The Worlds panic from 1938 for "production value". A creative screenwriter could stretch that conceit far enough to even involve the military, to some extent.
But that's not what we got. Instead we got a third act that absolutely destroys anything meaningful that may have come before with a loud, digitally enhanced finale that means nothing. This is why I hate Super 8. The seeds of something very good were there, but instead of letting them grow, J.J. Abrams torched the garden, then salted the scorched earth.
Also, enough with the fucking lens flares!
P. S. - I'll be talking about Green Lantern soon, so get ready for it.
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