Why J.J. Abrams might not be the best choice to direct Star Wars VII

So, it’s been officially confirmed.  After months of feverish speculation, J.J. Abrams has been named as the director of Disney’s new instalment in the Star Wars franchise, due for release in 2015.  When the possibility of Abrams’ appointment first came to light, myriad newspapers and webzines started spewing forth opinion pieces offering in-depth analyses of this artistic marriage, and what it might mean for the future of cinema’s most beloved film series.  Most of these articles seemed to hold a strongly positive outlook on Abrams’ appointment (the Guardian go so far as to call it a match made in “geek heaven”), with many focussing on his much-lauded rejuvenation of the Star Trek film franchise, the second instalment of which is due in cinemas later this year.  This Geekzine opinion piece will be one which takes a more measured view of Abrams’ appointment, and in part forms a response to articles such as Empire’s, which argue passionately that Abrams is the perfect choice to craft a film (or films) that will celebrate the legacy of Star Wars whilst standing as an impressive piece of work in its own right.  By contrast, this writer finds Abrams to be a disappointingly ‘vanilla’ choice for the director of Star Wars VII, and one whose track record – upon closer inspection – casts some doubt on his suitability to safeguard the legacy of the original trilogy.

Though his omnipresence in A-list circles may seem a relatively recent phenomenon, J.J. Abrams’ rise has been a gradual one, beginning with some Hollywood script work in the early ’90s followed by a fruitful television career, with shows Felicity and Alias (both of which Abrams created, wrote and directed himself) achieving considerable critical and commercial success.  He returned to the world of cinema in 2006, in the director’s chair of Mission Impossible 3, a film which managed to revitalise the ailing movie franchise.  Since then Abrams has directed twice more, bringing a rebooted Star Trek to the screen in 2009, and realising his Spielberg-homage Super 8 in 2011.  Star Trek Into Darkness, due to be released in May, will be the fourth movie he has directed in addition to his production work on films like Cloverfield and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.  What all these films have in common (bar the unreleased Star Trek sequel) is that every one of them has been a huge success with critics and audiences alike, and Abrams has developed something of a reputation for being an artist who can turn a tidy profit without diluting his often geeky subject matter.  So far, so good; Disney’s appointment of Abrams as director of Star Wars VII seems a solid choice when taking into account his form of the last seven years.  But is he actually the right person for the job?

To properly assess Abrams’ merits as a potential Star Wars director, it is necessary to turn away from his more original work and instead look at his approach to the other two pre-existing franchises which he has successfully reinvigorated; Mission Impossible 3 & Star Trek.  Abrams’ original creations – such as Fringe and Alias – rightly have their own distinctive feel, and are of a consistently high quality, but it’s when we turn our attention to his work on others’ creations that we begin to see why Abrams and Star Wars might not be the perfect match.  Mission Impossible 3 is less of an issue here.  Despite being based upon a pre-existing TV series, the Mission Impossible film franchise had little in the way of mythology behind it; John Woo’s second instalment in 2000 had effectively turned the series into a mediocre Bond pastiche, and all Abrams had to do to preserve the Mission Impossible legacy was maintain a few vital elements (Ethan Hunt, the IMF, rubber masks) while he directed a much fresher take on the super-spy format.  Of much greater relevance here is Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, a new installment in a franchise with an extensive, pre-existing mythology across multiple media, stretching back decades.  Just like Star Wars.

So what can Abrams’ work on Star Trek tell us about his likely approach to Star Wars VII?  ‘Nothing definite’ is the short answer, but it might give us a few clues as to what we can expect, clues which are not at all encouraging.  While Star Trek is certainly an entertaining, exciting and well-shot blockbuster, it shows almost no reverence for the series’ classic mythology.  Abrams picks and chooses certain famous elements that long-time audiences will recognise (Starfleet, the Kobayashi Maru, green-skinned alien girls, Chekov’s preposterous accent)  but completely does away with the tone of the original movies and replaces it with the same knowing irony that permeates his other work.  In the context of original creations like Super 8, or a series with a slight mythos like Mission Impossible, this isn’t a problem; clearly, this is Abrams’ favoured approach to film making.  But in the context of a series with a long and influential history like the Star Trek franchise, such an approach reduced the new installment to simply a sci-fi action/adventure movie with a distinctly modern sensibility, merely wearing a skin of Star Trek mythology.  Scratch beneath the shiny surface detail, composed of gleaming, retro re-creations of control panels and ship hulls first dreamt of in the 1960s, and you’ll find very little indeed that ties Abrams’ Star Trek film to those that have gone before it.

And why not, you might say.  Star Trek was never perfect, and for every Wrath of Khan there was a Search for Spock.  Why not allow a much more irreverent re-interpretation of the adventures of Kirk, Spock et al for a modern audience, thereby revitalising the series as a whole?  What’s more, fans of Abrams’ film point to the plot’s emphasis on timeline differentiation as justification for the difference in tone; the temporal mechanics of the storyline ensure that this tonal inconsistency remains backed up by story logic.  But a similar approach by Abrams to the Star Wars universe will not work.  Star Wars VII will not be a reboot, but a continuation of the original trilogy.  It will need to show a reverence for what has gone before, and wholeheartedly embrace the mythology established by Episodes IV-VI.  Abrams may have reinvigorated Star Trek but he did not show it reverence, and this is why the success of his take on that titanic sci-fi series does not automatically mean – despite the beliefs of some film critics – that he is the right director for the Star Wars gig.

Another important consideration is that Star Wars – unlike Star Trek – has never been a hard sci-fi series.  Episodes IV-VI are as fantastical as they are futuristic, despite George Lucas’ misguided attempt to provide a scientific explanation for the Force in Episode I, and fantasy is far less resilient to the sort of smirking post-modernism exhibited by Abrams’ work than is science-fiction.  When you’re telling a story that is essentially an epic saga about space-wizards, you’re always swerving dangerously close to being ridiculous, something that many of Lucas’ early-80s imitators discovered the hard way.  Consider how extremely rare the moments of knowing humour are in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, and how a general tone of irony, the like of which characterises Abrams’ Star Trek, would completely undermine a story which hinges upon more a profound suspension of disbelief by its audience.  The po-facedness required to make good fantasy films is resolutely out of fashion in Hollywood at the moment.  Indeed, Abrams is seen as a safe pair of hands precisely because what is considered ‘safe’ these days is a director who doesn’t take their subject matter too seriously, but for Episode VII to be a genuine continuation of the Star Wars saga it will have to take itself seriously.  For this reason, Abrams’ work on Star Trek is no guarantee whatsoever that he will direct a Star Wars film worthy of the name.

This article must come with a couple of caveats, however.  Just because Abrams has shown ironic and irreverent tendencies in his cinematic output up to this point, it doesn’t mean he won’t find an alternative way to approach Star Wars VII.  A very important distinction still needs to be made between the two great franchises of science-fiction cinema in this context, and that is Abrams’ attitude towards both of them.  By his own admission, he has never been a fan of the Star Trek TV series or accompanying movies, and this may go some way to explaining the dismissive attitude he has displayed towards the series’ history.  By contrast, he is by all accounts a huge fan of the original Star Wars trilogy, and this perhaps bodes well for a more reverent approach to that franchise’s mythology.  I have thus far underplayed the role of the screenwriter, too; Michael Arndt will arguably have even more of an impact on the direction of Star Wars VII than Abrams himself, and great things are expected from the scribe who brought us both Little Miss Sunshine and Toy Story 3.  There is still a very good chance that Episode VII will be a worthy addition to the Star Wars canon, and I for one hope it will prove every doubter wrong.  Certainly, whatever Abrams and Arndt produce is bound to be better than Lucas’ execrable prequels, but how much better remains to be seen.  Abrams perhaps has the potential to pull off a Star Wars film that celebrates the legacy of the series whilst simultaneously standing on its own merits as a quality piece of cinema, but such an outcome is by no means certain.