Jabrams and Star Wars

So, the latest announcement regarding the new, Disney-produced Star Wars films is that JJ Abrams is going to direct the newest one.

Abrams is one of the most powerful operators in Hollywood right now. Making his name first in TV-show creation (most notably Lost, as well as the aforementioned Fringe,) Abrams has, over the last few years, made his presence known on the big screen as well, both as a producer and a director.

Abrams is clearly setting himself up as an heir to Steven Spielberg, and has a great sense for spectacle and blockbuster. He had a success in his Mission Impossible III, and created an impressive homage to Spielberg films of the 70s and 80s with Super 8 (produced by Spielberg himself.) He's also behind the very successful Star Trek continuity-friendly reboot.

It's actually this project in particular that makes me optimistic about an Abrams Star Wars. As argued in the Red Letter Media review, Abrams's Star Trek is more of an action/adventure film than what one typically expects from Star Trek. Trek '09 dispenses with most of the philosophical quandaries and ethical conflict in favor of a super-charged action flick with lots of ass-kicking starship battles.

Abrams is big on emotion, and favors emotional stories over cerebral ones, which made Trek '09 a very fun movie, even if it was not exactly a Trek movie in the traditional sense (in fairness, the Next-Gen era films at least were fairly action-focused as well, which made Picard seem very un-Picard-like.)

But the thing about that is that this emotional, visceral approach to sci-fi might feel odd with Star Trek, but it's absolutely perfect for Star Wars. No one ever goes into the details of how space ships work, or how alien biology works, or how the Force works in Star Wars. It's about order and chaos, selfishness and selflessness, and good and evil.

It's often been said that Trek '09 was the Star Wars prequel we had all been hoping for in the previous decade. With the same, super-capable filmmaker at the helm, my expectations have been raised.