He was also executive producer and consultant to all 115 episodes, making him the ruling creative force for the entirety of the show.Mycroft Holmes said:
J.J. Abrams Yearns For Mystery In The Star Wars Universe
- Thread starter Karloff
- Start date
The way Abrams talks about his "mystery box," the more I'm thinking that we're gonna have a lot of retconning, or just simply a "EU" and "Abrams Universe."
Which I'm not TOO against, tbh, since a lot of the EU enjoyed reviving Palpatine and redoing the Original Trilogy's storyline until we were sick to death of it. Barring the Yuuzhan Vong War and the Second Galactic Civil War (the one where basically every organization became an asshole and Jacen Solo turned to the Dark Side), a lot of the storylines in the EU were... how you say it... not all that great to write home about.
Which I'm not TOO against, tbh, since a lot of the EU enjoyed reviving Palpatine and redoing the Original Trilogy's storyline until we were sick to death of it. Barring the Yuuzhan Vong War and the Second Galactic Civil War (the one where basically every organization became an asshole and Jacen Solo turned to the Dark Side), a lot of the storylines in the EU were... how you say it... not all that great to write home about.
I just have to keep repeating to myself "he can't be worse than Lucas... He can't be worse than Lucas..."
... this isn't as comforting as I'd hoped.
... this isn't as comforting as I'd hoped.
If he wants to return mystery to the universe, he should start with the Force, and a retcon.
I imagine a scene where Luke is talking to the main character of the new films about the old Jedi Order, and how they thought that this type of cell called "Midi-Chlorians" was an indicator of one's ability with the Force.. but that it was later discovered by the Empire that that was totally wrong, that Midi-Chlorians had nothing to do with the Force, and that in fact no one knew how or why the Force manifested in a person.
I imagine a scene where Luke is talking to the main character of the new films about the old Jedi Order, and how they thought that this type of cell called "Midi-Chlorians" was an indicator of one's ability with the Force.. but that it was later discovered by the Empire that that was totally wrong, that Midi-Chlorians had nothing to do with the Force, and that in fact no one knew how or why the Force manifested in a person.
I honestly can't figure out why J.J. Abrams is famous. I started to formulate a theory that he gets by on a catchy "name" and hipster glasses. I didn't watch Lost and the Star Trek movies were bad. And these days Lost is just used as a funny joke as to how nobody knew wtf happened.
I honestly tried to figure this out before and came up with nothing credible. Please, someone tell me why J.J. Abrams has superstar status.
Edit: and somehow he was famous even before he got Star Trek.
I honestly tried to figure this out before and came up with nothing credible. Please, someone tell me why J.J. Abrams has superstar status.
Edit: and somehow he was famous even before he got Star Trek.
Executive producer is a pretty meaningless title. Producers have more to do with hiring people, fund raising, and arranging distribution than they do with deciding the actual content. And consultants have no creative control either; especially in JJ's case where it was more a courtesy than anything.Johnny Novgorod said:
JJ left during season 1 to go film a new mission impossible movie and do actual work on Alias. The entire non season 1 plot was brainstormed and executed by Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. JJ Abrahm's had next to nothing to do with the overarching plot.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_lost/8/
I dunno, David Chase was "executive producer" of The Sopranos. Would you say he had "next to nothing to do with the overarching plot"? He also wrote 24 of the 86 episodes, but the show had writers with more eps to their credit.Mycroft Holmes said:
Executive producers have a creative hand in the stuff they produce, which usually goes uncredited. It's nothing new.
Executive producer can be pretty open ended. In the 1950s and 60s producers controlled most everything about a movie or tv show. Nowadays you can do literally nothing and be added to a project as a producer.Johnny Novgorod said:
Ontop of that it depends on the person. Some people are producers who control every aspect of a project still, by being the director and writer as well. David Chase clearly decided to be a writer as well and apparently wrote over 25% of all the episodes. So yeah no shit he had a creative hand in the show. Just like how Tarentino can produce, direct and write at the same time. Because they choose to be involved on all levels.
Tarentino wasn't a giant creative force on the set because he was producing it, he was because he wrote it and he directed it. David Chase wasn't a creative force on the show because he produced it, he was because he obviously wrote a ton of the episodes and was thus involved in the characterization and the plot direction. JJ Abrahm's wasn't a creative force on Lost he wasn't writing for it. He wasn't even around. He was off making a film, or off working on Alias. He directed and wrote the pilot, and wrote one other episode. David Chase literally wrote the last episode of the Sopranos. JJ Abrahm's wasn't even around for the last two seasons. It isn't even remotely the same thing. Cuse and Lindelof talked about how they sat down together and hashed out the overarching plot of the entire series. They didn't sit down with Abrahms. JJ Abrahms wrote an episode where a plane crashes, shit gets real, a few main characters are established and then they go out in the woods and there's a polar bear. And wrote but didn't direct an episode where Sawyer, Kate and Jack were locked in polar bear cages and Ben want's Jack to do his surgery. That's basically 90% of his entire contribution to Lost. Mostly him trying to ramroad polar bears into the series and being ignored by all the other writers in every other episode.
He's just a man who loves polar bears and had really nothing to do with the Lost story.
Guys, I figured it out! JJ Abrams is the Peter Molyneux of film!
Think about it, he constantly oversells his movies as some kind of insane, you-can't-even-imagine kind of work that will redefine entire genres, then when they release they turn out to be just perfectly average and forgettable installments, only noteworthy for how spectacularly they failed to live up to their creator's hype.
What if...what if Abrams and Molyneux are the same person?
Think about it, he constantly oversells his movies as some kind of insane, you-can't-even-imagine kind of work that will redefine entire genres, then when they release they turn out to be just perfectly average and forgettable installments, only noteworthy for how spectacularly they failed to live up to their creator's hype.
What if...what if Abrams and Molyneux are the same person?
How wrong exactly is it to hope that one of us breaks his neck before this comes to pass? Either was, I don't want to see that.
I hope the new movies focus on the light side of the Force. The IV-VI trilogy needs to remain the centrepiece of Star Wars, so if the prequels were a story of decline, the middle piece about the rising of a hope in the face of hopelessness, whatever comes after needs to push forward with that and expand on what it is about the Force that makes it something to have faith and hope in, which all viewers of Star Wars did. I feel Abrams is totally the wrong person to do that with his dark, dazzling and ultimately pointless previous films. He can't add substance to what was central to Star Wars. I'd rather they got KOTOR writers or fucking Eckhart Tolle to write the thing. Better some hackneyed philosophical "oomph" (whatever that is) than all dazzle and no heart.
To be honest, I don't want the force to be mentioned at all. Or if it is, severely downplayed. I'd rather have a movie about smugglers and bounty hunters, scoundrels and knaves. We've seen enough of the force and like many have said here, Abrams will just add something that doesn't belong and screw it up.Blood Brain Barrier said:
What if it does belong and actually works? That would be glorious. This isn't a spin-off, it's meant to be canon. I agree let's have the smugglers and scoundrels, great, but the force is at the centre of SW. It's a good chance to redeem itself from the horrible prequels, to make a statement that is surprising and spiritual rather than just all-out action like you'd expect. And this time Abrams has help in the form of Kasdan.Ishal said:
I think you messed up the quoting as I got this as a response to me. I was about to write a lengthy response to Mycroft but you covered a lot of it with a bit more brevity. At the end of the day the ease with which you found a video with Kreia is why I tell so many people to do their own research, which is probably what I would have told him to be honest, especially when he dropped that whole "Citation Needed" bit in reference to a big part of the promotion used to sell "KOTOR2" especially when it was first coming out (ie George being involved in it, albeit indirectly, through his notes and such, even before the game was released there was a lot of discussion about what big secrets about the universe were going to be dropped... and honestly it did, by approaching the whole issue of The Force directly).Ishal said:
One point of correction I will make though is that the space bacteria are not "The Force", they are something through which The Force works. The Force is supposed to be like a metaphysical entity that is throughout all things, it's intelligent, but isn't a being like us, or the traditional representation of a god. It tends to work through what's there and presents the illusion of free will. Those "bacteria" are as I said sort of like points of articulation on a puppet, making it easier for The Force to work through specific people and do more, more easily, without needing to
be overt about it.
The thing is that Star Wars is based more along eastern styles of spirituality and the concept of "Fate" as opposed to western ones and the belief in free will, at least in how it works in a metaphysical sense. The basic idea being that everything is predestined but very few, if any, people realize it, and even those that do cannot do anything about it. Everyone has their role to play, and every choice you make is irrelevant as the outcome was predetermined before you made it, though from your perspective you think you still made a choice. Very much "we're all players and the world is our stage" taken to an extreme, everyone simply carries out their role in the story, oblivious to what it is. This kind of belief ultimately being used to reinforce caste systems and the like, with certain people being basically chosen to do certain kinds of things. In the scope of day to day life, if someone say commits a crime he does so because he was predestined to, but the guy who lops his hands off for it was also predestined to do that. All small parts of the backround of the celestrial drama so to speak. In such cultures trying to change one's fate oftentimes has horrible repercussions, but can also be argued as itself being predestined.
In the scope of Star Wars, nobody realizes what they are doing is predestined, only one person in anything remotely considered canon even suspected it (that we know of). To them everything is "normal" and as outside viewers watching the movies it still represents entertaining stories. That said, looking in from the outside, knowing how things work, and looking at the pattern, it's easy to predict where things inevitably have to go if the work is going to maintain it's integrity within the canon. They ended the story at the highest possible point for the given cycle, since it's all down hill from there until the next one.
True Prophecy is always a touchy subject when it comes up, as by definition if the future is predetermined, nobody has any free will. Star Wars takes the approach the precognition that it always comes true, as opposed to warning as possible futures, since the very force giving the prophecies is controlling everything and is pretty much saying "this is what I'm about to do". It's hardly unique, but ultimately Star Wars was about the way the prophecy was going to be fulfilled, not whether it was true or not. Nobody questioned the validity of prophecy either (which raises some interesting questions), but rather tried to interpet it.
It's also interesting to note while I'm rambling that this also features into "Knights Of The Old Republic Online" where they go out of the way in each character's storyline to have a prophecy about them (on Voss Ka) typically something bad which they want to avert, but they are told flat out "this cannot be changed, no matter what you do,
this happens"... and it does. It's really kind of everywhere in Star Wars when the people writing it have bothered to research it.
At any rate, this is all an academic argument, the point being that Star Wars has to go in a very specific direction from this point, or else it's not Star Wars anymore. You start throwing out all the prophecies, chosen ones, etc... and it's not Star Wars anymore. What's more as a few fanboys have pointed out, understanding this allows a sort of joking explanation for some of the series more laughable elements... such as "if Imperial Storm Troopers are such an elite force, their marksmanship praised earlier when they apparently disabled a giant armored transport, how do they miss perfectly lined up shots against guys running through open rooms right in front of them?", the answer to that becomes justifiable as the characters they are missing being metaphysically favored as part of the ongoing predestined story, even if The Force isn't working through him directly in terms of mysical abilities, Han Solo is needed to play is role for example, thus anytime someone shoots at him they miss, unless there is a reason for something bad to happen to him. Ditto for that whole "WTF" moment where Obi-Wan, dangling over a ledge with Darth Maul above him, performing an incredibly improbable super-move, taking him by surprise, and winning the fight (when if he could do something like
that normally, why didn't he?). Then of course there is the most obvious one that already smacked of divine intervention, involving a little kid (Anakin) hopping into a Star Fighter with no previous piloting experience, and then more or less "accidently" out flying veteran pilots and blowing up an enemy command ship.... it's interesting stuff to think about retroactively. Honestly though I think in the original trilogy a lot of it was just action movie cliques, but in the prequels they spelled it out pretty much in 50' flaming letters for anyone who missed the "immaculate conception" reference which was to me more eye rolling than the space bacteria.
Yeah looks like I derped. That's what happens when you're in a hurry.Therumancer said:I think you messed up the quoting as I got this as a response to me. I was about to write a lengthy response to Mycroft but you covered a lot of it with a bit more brevity. At the end of the day the ease with which you found a video with Kreia is why I tell so many people to do their own research, which is probably what I would have told him to be honest, especially when he dropped that whole "Citation Needed" bit in reference to a big part of the promotion used to sell "KOTOR2" especially when it was first coming out (ie George being involved in it, albeit indirectly, through his notes and such, even before the game was released there was a lot of discussion about what big secrets about the universe were going to be dropped... and honestly it did, by approaching the whole issue of The Force directly).
One point of correction I will make though is that the space bacteria are not "The Force", they are something through which The Force works. The Force is supposed to be like a metaphysical entity that is throughout all things, it's intelligent, but isn't a being like us, or the traditional representation of a god. It tends to work through what's there and presents the illusion of free will. Those "bacteria" are as I said sort of like points of articulation on a puppet, making it easier for The Force to work through specific people and do more, more easily, without needing to
be overt about it.
The thing is that Star Wars is based more along eastern styles of spirituality and the concept of "Fate" as opposed to western ones and the belief in free will, at least in how it works in a metaphysical sense. The basic idea being that everything is predestined but very few, if any, people realize it, and even those that do cannot do anything about it. Everyone has their role to play, and every choice you make is irrelevant as the outcome was predetermined before you made it, though from your perspective you think you still made a choice. Very much "we're all players and the world is our stage" taken to an extreme, everyone simply carries out their role in the story, oblivious to what it is. This kind of belief ultimately being used to reinforce caste systems and the like, with certain people being basically chosen to do certain kinds of things. In the scope of day to day life, if someone say commits a crime he does so because he was predestined to, but the guy who lops his hands off for it was also predestined to do that. All small parts of the backround of the celestrial drama so to speak. In such cultures trying to change one's fate oftentimes has horrible repercussions, but can also be argued as itself being predestined.
In the scope of Star Wars, nobody realizes what they are doing is predestined, only one person in anything remotely considered canon even suspected it (that we know of). To them everything is "normal" and as outside viewers watching the movies it still represents entertaining stories. That said, looking in from the outside, knowing how things work, and looking at the pattern, it's easy to predict where things inevitably have to go if the work is going to maintain it's integrity within the canon. They ended the story at the highest possible point for the given cycle, since it's all down hill from there until the next one.
True Prophecy is always a touchy subject when it comes up, as by definition if the future is predetermined, nobody has any free will. Star Wars takes the approach the precognition that it always comes true, as opposed to warning as possible futures, since the very force giving the prophecies is controlling everything and is pretty much saying "this is what I'm about to do". It's hardly unique, but ultimately Star Wars was about the way the prophecy was going to be fulfilled, not whether it was true or not. Nobody questioned the validity of prophecy either (which raises some interesting questions), but rather tried to interpet it.
It's also interesting to note while I'm rambling that this also features into "Knights Of The Old Republic Online" where they go out of the way in each character's storyline to have a prophecy about them (on Voss Ka) typically something bad which they want to avert, but they are told flat out "this cannot be changed, no matter what you do,
this happens"... and it does. It's really kind of everywhere in Star Wars when the people writing it have bothered to research it.
At any rate, this is all an academic argument, the point being that Star Wars has to go in a very specific direction from this point, or else it's not Star Wars anymore. You start throwing out all the prophecies, chosen ones, etc... and it's not Star Wars anymore. What's more as a few fanboys have pointed out, understanding this allows a sort of joking explanation for some of the series more laughable elements... such as "if Imperial Storm Troopers are such an elite force, their marksmanship praised earlier when they apparently disabled a giant armored transport, how do they miss perfectly lined up shots against guys running through open rooms right in front of them?", the answer to that becomes justifiable as the characters they are missing being metaphysically favored as part of the ongoing predestined story, even if The Force isn't working through him directly in terms of mysical abilities, Han Solo is needed to play is role for example, thus anytime someone shoots at him they miss, unless there is a reason for something bad to happen to him. Ditto for that whole "WTF" moment where Obi-Wan, dangling over a ledge with Darth Maul above him, performing an incredibly improbable super-move, taking him by surprise, and winning the fight (when if he could do something like
that normally, why didn't he?). Then of course there is the most obvious one that already smacked of divine intervention, involving a little kid (Anakin) hopping into a Star Fighter with no previous piloting experience, and then more or less "accidently" out flying veteran pilots and blowing up an enemy command ship.... it's interesting stuff to think about retroactively. Honestly though I think in the original trilogy a lot of it was just action movie cliques, but in the prequels they spelled it out pretty much in 50' flaming letters for anyone who missed the "immaculate conception" reference which was to me more eye rolling than the space bacteria.
Mitichlorians (spelling?) are a deliberate explanation to how the force can/does work. It's said through the explanation of the immaculate conception that they were responsible for Anakin being born, and that all jedi (and thus all force sensitives?) have concentrations of them. Star Wars is something that has always played fast and loose with canon. In fact, as messy as it can be its one thing I like about the franchise. Each time a new IP crops up the people over at Wookiepedia must have kittens trying to figure out where to jam it into the timeline. But that said, the movies are the closest thing to primary source when it comes to canon. So how we interpret it may differ, the fact that Lucas decided to throw in that explanation is something big to consider.
On Destiny, yes. The Star wars original trilogy is very much the heroes journey and the various things that happen along the way. And it's not like these things weren't touched upon. Part of Han Solo's personal arc was going from saying
"Kid I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff. But nothing to make me think there some all powerful force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy that controls my destiny."
to
"Hey Luke, may the force be with you." before getting into the Battle of Yavin.
In fact, it's tacit in that very statement. May the force be on my side, may it work through me and in my favor.
I think GO-TO has some of the best dialogue in all of KOTORII. Being a droid and thus untouched by the force he has a unique perspective. When talking to him on his ship he speculates that Revan left key infrastructure points intact such as government centers and factories. He is able to see the forces moving in the galaxy, he doesn't have the knowledge of a force sensitive like Kreia to understand it fully. But he knows they are exerting influence on events that he is seeking to stabilize. A perspective I enjoy in the Star Wars universe is that of people untouched by the force. To them, all force sensitives are Jedi. There is no Sith, especially since the red skinned race died off in the later points of the canon. Sith are just Dark Jedi, a splinter group of their religion. Good you brought up SWTOR since The Star Cabal in the imperial agent's story deals with this.
It's all about forces pushing back and forth against one another. Like you said, it's not about prophecy, everyone knows what the prophecy says, but no one really knows what it means. Anakin was supposed to bring balance, and he did, but not the way the Jedi perceived it. That's why Avellon's work in KOTOR II was so interesting. What Darth Nihilus was to the force was terrible, a breach through which he had no control. Kreia states that it's an old teaching and Nihilus was rapidly approaching the apex of its use. Making him on par with the ancient sith masters. It's easy to see how someone might seek the death of the force when things like this are possible. Jedi and other force users can do nothing to stop it, indeed it's even explained that Sith sect of assassins use it to grow in power in parallel with you. It's terrifying.
Star Wars is a very specific thing to a very specific set of fans, and what that thing is differs across the board. But only taking into account the movies. I don't think Abrams can do this if he is left to his own devices. People need to be on him at all times making sure he sticks to a coherent plan with no ass pull mysteries. The movies are very specific in their formula, and honestly I don't think they should deviate from that. So if that's what you're saying, then I agree. The stand alone side movies they plan on doing might offer more room for experimentation, I'm open to seeing it there.