I also loved loved *loved *the Star Trek reboot.
The three recent episodes of Star Wars pretty much killed my interest in that franchise however.
Likewise, except in my case, it wasn’t a complaint.
I’m looking forward to Darth Lensflare.
Every second of every scene he’s in, obscured by lens flare. A lens flare at every mention of his name.
"I can’t get a clean shot! His ship is obscured by lens flare!
Tangential to the thread, but the EU’s not canon–so far as the movie goes, they can treat it as if it never happened. Or they can cherry-pick what they like and don’t like, or they can adopt it wholesale. (This assumes that Disney continues Lucasfilm’s canon-classification system.) As to the prequels, I suspect that the plan is to Never Speak of Those Again.
As to Abrams: Not hugely familiar with his work. I liked Star Trek, but it was a bit… clean. Everything sparkly and white, as I recall. (Well, maybe the sparkle was just lens flare.) I don’t want to see that in Star Wars–of the mountain of complaints I have about the prequels, a very small one was that everything was so bright and shiny and new. I liked the grittiness of the original trilogy. But on reflection, that sort of aesthetic isn’t out of line for Star Trek–see TNG, for god’s sake–and so I don’t know if I’m right to be concerned that he’d bring it to Star Wars. We’ll see.
At the end of the day, he’s got one thing going for him: He’s not George Lucas.
Oh my! Lensflares could finally explain why Stormtroopers are such bad shots!
He’s dead, Luke.
Dammit Han, I’m a Jedi, not an escalator!
(Said about JarJar): he had a childhood accident. With a mechanical Gungan picker.
Neither am I, but they aren’t hiring me to direct it.
Postpone it until after Avengers 2, then let Joss have a crack at it. And definitely let him write the story.
[cue howls of outrage from haters]
I thought that was part of it being Star Trek - this spotless, hi-tech, idealized future, at least in space. The worlds were allowed a bit of grit…
I think that was a deliberate choice by Lucas, to try to show how great the Old Republic was before it all went to crap. Which isn’t a crazy decision to me… unlike, say, Jar Jar.
It’s more than that - it’s that Lucas wanted to excise anything spontaneous, anything roguish, anything less-than-noble from the series. You know, anything Han Solo. He wanted his story to be about princesses and knights and Promised Ones, not about down-on-their-luck criminals who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Minor nitpicks aside, I have enjoyed everything that Abrams/Bad Robot has been involved in, so this seems like a good idea to me. The only thing I’d be worried about would be that he’d not go far enough from the reboot Star Trek aesthetic, and it’d end up being just Star Trek with lightsabers. But I trust him enough as a stylist to expect him to come up with a new design for the Star Wars universe.
Am I the only one who didn’t even register the lens flares that everyone’s complaining about?
At least, not when I saw the movie on the big (IMAX) screen. I was too busy enjoying it.
The thing is…at the point that 2009’s Trek came out, Trek was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Voyager had its fans, but hadn’t been all that well received. Enterprise wasn’t all that well liked (couldn’t say for myself, never watched it) and had ended relatively early compared to TNG, DS9, and Voyager (and had been the first series since TOS to be canceled by the network instead of ended by showrunners). The last Trek movie had done poorly in theaters and wasn’t all that well liked either. Even the goodwill that the original TNG series had gained seemed to be draining away…many who looked back on it called it dull, dated and bloodless compared to TOS or DS9.
And then 2009’s Trek came along…and did phenomenal box office and was quite well received by critics. To my mind (and nothing against those who disagree) it had a good balance between good action and good characters. Now Star Trek lives again as a movie series.
So it isn’t too far-fetched to hope that J.J. might do the same thing again with Star Wars…take a franchise that past installments have tarnished and breathe new life into it. As a matter of fact, when my friend Alan and I left that theatre that night we both agreed that this movie was everything the Star Wars prequels SHOULD have been…and he was skeptical of this movie because he’d been so peeved at the prequels.
(I also get a kick out of the aforementioned Onion video. 
)
Also see his 2011 film “Super 8” in which the phony lens flare was even more distracting to me because the story wasn’t set on a glittery futuristic spaceship. The light kept appearing from places where there logically wouldn’t be any light source. It continually took me out of the reality of what was otherwise a pretty good movie.
I didn’t register it either, but I was too distracted by how terrible the film was.
Watch out, the J.J. stands for Jar Jar.
haha! I never noticed the lens flare but, now that everyone’s joking on it, I’ll have to pay more attention during the 10,000,000th time my husband wants to re-watch Star Trek.
Honestly, my first thought was, that it’s almost a creative monopoly with the same guy directing Star Wars and Star Trek, right?
I didn’t like Super 8 either, but I’m cautiously optimistic to see how he presents the story of the young Jewish-farmboy-turned-Jedi-apprentice Lens Flareworker in Star Wars: Episode VII - Flare of the Lenses.
If he blows up Coruscant, I’m walking.
As for the ST movie, it was worse than the original concept but a lot better than what ST had become by the end. the next one will really tell, though.
That’s okay, maybe you can snark on shaky-cam instead.
I am a long time Trekker of the first order.
I did not expect to enjoy ST 2009.
I was pleasantly surprised. A respectable reboot for a new generation.
But as Voyager cannily notes, the trick is to make the second film better than the first.