Visionaries belong doing their own works, when it comes to playing with an established property you want someone who is going to do the property right, not change it around to the point where it isn't the same thing anymore. This is especially true when you take source material with a message, and then have a film maker come along and make a version of it that has a totally differant message that might be more popular for the moment. "V for Vendetta" would be an example of this.
To be honest with you I think JJ Abrams has plenty of style, he's very good of working with "of the moment" referances, points of view, and creating some pretty "hip" works. Lost for example might have turned out badly, but it was a pop culture phenomena because he knew all the buttons to push for the people watching it right then and there, it fell apart when he wound up having to answer the questions he posed and actually wrap up a storyline, since he really didn't set out to create much other than a giant "of the moment" pop culture juggernaut which he succeeded on.
To be honest this is the wrong approach to take with "Star Wars" because it's not a current, hip, or "of the moment" thing, it's a fantasy world, intended to get away from all of that. What "cool" it has, it gets from not being anything like the conventions you'd expect.
While his version of Star Trek was a good movie, it failed at being a STAR TREK movie because he pretty much sacrificed the entire vision in exchange for trying to make it approachable to kids. Star Trek at it's core being a piece of military adventure drama, set in the future. The kinds of immature kids he presented might be something kids could in theory identify with, but not something that fits the theme or the setting. The whole "Top Gun" thing doesn't really work with Star Trek, and they really had to push the envelope of believability to even try and go there, because on a real military vessel (including one in Star Trek) Kirk would have probably been executed on the spot for half a dozen offenses including disrespect to a superior officer, stowing away (under a very weak, stretched pretense), insubordination, and other things all under combat conditions (which makes all the differance). Simply having walked on the bridge under those circumstances should have probably gotten him locked in a cell. The thing is that this isn't an attempt to "pick" at the movie, it's something that anyone who is familiar with the source material is going to pick up on immediatly, Star Trek is a show that at it's core involves a lot of decorum, even among Kirk in TOS (he was arrogant, but from a position of already assigned command, and everyone under him generally followed protocol which is why it stood out when there were exceptions). Star Trek is not about a bunch of rowdy new milenium space liberals going for an adventure cruise in their funky space jalopy, and that is what JJ Abrams did to it. Perhaps popular with younger kids and those who aren't series fans, but generally dismissed as a wreck by fans. There is already a divide between the Abramsverse and the "Prime" Star Trek universe which includes pretty much everything else, a divide which exists largely to acknowlege that Abrams movie didn't suck, but had no business being Star Trek.
The problem I have Abrams taking over Star Wars is that his style is one where he's liable to try and introduce hipster Jedi that act a lot like kids today wish they could be. In short people who would probably wound up being severed from The Force and kicked out of the Jedi Order (or even The Sith). Star Wars being something that involves heavy themes of something bigger than yourself, and giving yourself over entirely to fate (which I could go into heavily) something that sometimes bothers people who truely understand the universe and how it works. You don't generally get to join the Order as an idiot and then "grow up" doing missions, you have to possess a degree of decorum to even focus enough to use The Force seriously (and that includes Anakin who represented a singular very special case that would be hard to duplicate as occuring again with any credability).
I'd disagee with Bob on a lot of the meaning of Star Wars and what it's rooted in (but that would be a long discussion in of itself). But the bottom line is Star Wars is it's own universe, not Abram's universe. Given his style I fear it being turned into attempts at being current-clever foder with hipster jedi running around all over the place, and thinly veiled analogies to current politics and issues which are the kinds of things we watch these movies to get away from. JJ's style is good for a lot of things, I like a lot of his work, but he's the wrong guy for this.
