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Star Wars Prequels Entertainment

J.J. Abrams To Direct Star Wars VII 735

Posted by samzenpus from the man-with-a-plan dept.
azzkicker writes "It looks like J.J. Abrams will direct Star Wars VII. From the article: 'Sources have confirmed the Star Trek Into Darkness filmmaker will helm the next Star Wars movie, the highly anticipated installment in the landmark franchise scheduled to reach theaters in 2015."
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J.J. Abrams To Direct Star Wars VII More

J.J. Abrams To Direct Star Wars VII

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  • No more time travel! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:27PM (#42685785)

    Time travel is the weakest of all SciFi plot devices, reserved for authors who are completely out of ideas.

    Please, Mr. Abrams, don't do that again.

    • Re:No more time travel! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:37PM (#42685907)

      Actually Mr Anonymous, many of the best episodes of classic sci-fi series like Star Trek and Stargate were all based on time-travel. Yesterday's Enterprise, Anyone?

      In other words, you are wrong and it is actually the complete opposite. Time Travel scares away novice sci-fi writers because they cannot wrap their heads around the paradoxical nature of such concepts, while the great writers are able to mold the concept into compelling, memorable science fiction.

      • Re:No more time travel! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Nostromo21 ( 1947840 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:46PM (#42686015)

        He obviously hasn't seen Primer.

      • Re:No more time travel! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by yurtinus ( 1590157 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:48PM (#42686671)
        More misses than hits in my opinion. Time travel *should* scare away more novice sci-fi writers than it does because more often than not, it's used as a cheap deus ex machina to introduce or resolve some part of the plot (like in the SG-1 season 8 finale, series finale, or *most* of Enterprise). If you want to explore time travel - explore it! Don't use it as a cheap gimmick to push along (or reboot!!) the story.

      • Re:No more time travel! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by loneDreamer ( 1502073 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @11:49PM (#42687501)
        Actually, he might have a point. I agree that time travel is a great thing if done right (Babylon 5 IMHO does it splendidly), but most movies/series do not pull it off. It end up being an inconsistent, illogical deux-ex-machina. I mean, I love fiction and fantasy, but that does not mean that I turn my brain off and believe anything.

        And I could not even enumerate the number of idiotic scenes in the last Star Trek movie! Just one example: "No, I can't kill you for mutiny, I'll have to abandon you without supplies on a frozen planet, in a star system were a black hole was just created! That's clearly more logical and humane! But hey, look at the bright side, maybe if you walk around for a while you'll meet a future copy of myself, and then find the only guy in the galaxy that can beam us to a moving ship (1 in a trillion odds, pretty easy), so you'll get back, in which case I'm not going to throw you out of an airlock, but make you captain above all my other qualified lieutenants... but just for a while, since to stop a bunch of miners that can suddenly put the galaxy on it's feet we'll beam ourselves to their ship and stop them hand to hand. What do you say? Why not beam a time-bomb or a few dozen armed guys just to be on the safe side? Nah, no fun in that. Also, it seems like overkill to me, it's only the Earth at stake here, remember? Kneel before my superior logic!"

        No... this is definitely NOT good news.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Asmor ( 775910 )

        I find it's rare for time travel to be done right. As a big fan of Stargate... I don't think they ever did it right on that series. They certainly didn't do it egregiously wrong, but they never did it right. Haven't watched any Star Trek except the recent JJ Abrams movie, so can't comment much on that.

        What did time travel right? Well, Babylon 5. And... I feel like there's probably something else, but that's about it off the top of my head.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dwywit ( 1109409 )

      "A world out of time" by Larry Niven. None of the usual "kill your grandfather" paradoxes, but a well-thought-out and entertaining story about a man catapulted a L O N G way into the future.

      • Re:No more time travel! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by deimtee ( 762122 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @10:20PM (#42686895) Journal
        That's really just a far-future story, with a lot of relatavistic travel. What people are complaining about is any serious story with a grandfather paradox. They are logically incoherent.
        You can play it for comedy, eg one of the better time travel scenes is in the Bill and Ted movie where they and the bad guy keep going back to trump each other's move.

        But seriously, there are only two possibilities for time travel.
        (1) The universe is fully deteministic in which case the time-travel already occurred and the travel will change nothing, or
        (2) alternate universe "time-lines" in which case whatever horrible thing you are trying to change still occurred in the original universe and you have just created a copy. Nobody ever deals with that.

      • "A world out of time" by Larry Niven. None of the usual "kill your grandfather" paradoxes, but a well-thought-out and entertaining story about a man catapulted a L O N G way into the future.

        Except that Niven didn't use a 'time machine' to do it, he merely had the ship park just barely inside the event horizon of a black hole on a trajectory that would take it a couple million years to come out.

  • MTV Star Wars! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:28PM (#42685789)

    Luke, Leia and Han are supercool heroes from a galaxy far, far away. And boy are they full of angst.

  • The Lens Flare!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheBilgeRat ( 1629569 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:30PM (#42685807)
    ... is going to be killer.

  • 1 Word (Score:5, Funny)

    by girlintraining ( 1395911 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:30PM (#42685815)

    "KAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHNNNN!"

    (and this text goes in here because slashdot hates 1 word answers, even when they're totally awesome.)

  • It makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheGoodNamesWereGone ( 1844118 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:34PM (#42685859)
    It makes sense, as he already did a Star Wars movie in 2009. The descent of both franchises to the dark side will be complete.

  • Wait a second... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:35PM (#42685877)
    So the same person is now in charge of both the Star Wars movies and the Star Trek movies?

    I think i just felt a disturbance in the force, as if millions of fans involved in the never ending "which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek?" debates suddenly cried out in bewilderment and then their heads asploded.

    • Re:Wait a second... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hermitdev ( 2792385 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:44PM (#42685975)
      Meanwhile, those of us that like both Star Wars & Star Trek are thinking, "hrrm, Episode 7 has a chance now of not sucking."

      • Re:Wait a second... (Score:4, Informative)

        by dadelbunts ( 1727498 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:21PM (#42686403)
        Star Trek was an abomination. Being able to beam into warp destroys the Star-Trek universe worse than midichlorians ever did.

        • Re:Wait a second... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Baloroth ( 2370816 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @11:52PM (#42687519)

          Star Trek was an abomination. Being able to beam into warp destroys the Star-Trek universe worse than midichlorians ever did.

          Not at all. All Scotty had to do was reverse the polarity of the beam, and boom! Problem solved!

          Seriously, if you are worried about the coherency of the Star Trek universe... well, lets just say that ship sailed around, oh, the second episode of the original series? Being generous. Transporters alone "destroyed" the Star Trek universe. Hell, they weren't even supposed to exist (they are vastly more advanced than the Federation should have had, given the rest of their technology), but the show didn't have the budget for a shuttle.

        • Why? It never made much sense that you could still maintain communication with a ship but not beam to it, as the canonical explanation of beaming was that it translated you into information, sent it as a signal and reassembled it. It's not like a displace, where you'd have to keep a wormhole end stable in a different (and changing) frame of reference, all you need to do is send the signal (the mechanism for the reassembly was never explained, presumably it involved magic). Beaming to a moving target is j

      • Re:Wait a second... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Rhapsody Scarlet ( 1139063 ) on Friday January 25, 2013 @03:05AM (#42688403) Homepage

        Meanwhile, those of us that like both Star Wars & Star Trek are thinking, "hrrm, Episode 7 has a chance now of not sucking."

        Assuming you actually liked Star Trek XI, which I didn't. At all. Not even a bit. In fact, I rated it my second worst Star Trek movie (saved from the bottom only by The Final Frontier). Want some reasons? I've got plenty, but here's just a few (spoilers incoming!):

        First, I see a lot of people talking about transwarp beaming, with some even defending it going "Oh, well you know beaming was just to save on money in the first place", which was was, which is irrelevant. Beaming was fine because beaming had rules. You can only beam over certain distances, you can't beam through certain atmospheric conditions, you can't beam at warp unless it's between two ships and they're both going at exactly the same speed and you have an extremely skilled operator. These rules keep it from being too powerful a plot device. So what does Abrams do? Transwarp beaming! Beam to a ship ridiculous distances away that's travelling at warp from a (relatively) stationary planet!

        That's bullshit because it's just lazy. Abrams wrote himself into a corner. Kirk needs to be on the planet to meet future Spock but Kirk and Scotty need to be on the Enterprise to fulfil their destinies, but oh shit the Enterprise warped off fucking hours ago. I know! Deus ex machina, and they're in the engineering section. It's just bad writing.

        It also brings me too... oh fucking hell, give me a second. It brings me too... the worst set. In all of Star Trek history. Even the Original Series. That engineering section. Just... what? Seriously, what? What is it? What are all these pipes? What do they do? How do they fit on the Enterprise? What was the designer smoking? I really, really don't get this set. Even in a narrative sense, what's it for? One stupid scene where Scotty gets stuck in the pipes? You could've cut that whole scene from the movie and nothing else would have to change. So why? Why not at least make it match the bridge and shuttlebay in style and design rather than feeling like a totally difference franchise in there?

        Oh, but then we come to style and design. It's just rule of cool, even when it makes no sense. The Romulan mining ship? A 'simple mining ship' that looks like some fever-dreamed eldrich abomination? I mean, I know it has to look imposing but that's not just some lowly mining ship so why does it look like that? Because it's cool of course! Explanations are for losers! Also 'red matter', surely the midicholorians of Star Trek. An incredibly powerful substance out of nowhere that can make black holes out of nothing and destroy whole stars because that's not overpowered. Also, 'red matter'? Even Spock calls it red matter, is that really what it's called? That's the scentific name? Red matter? They couldn't even care enough to give it a vaguely 'sciency' name like 'trilithium' from Generations? It may be small, but the small things are what make you know they care, and they didn't with this movie.

        If this is what Star Wars VII is going to be like then we're going to see something very special. We're going to see the franchise find an even lower place than the prequel trilogy.

        • If your first critique of a movie is "I see a lot of people talking about transwarp beaming, with some even defending it" you have no business attempting to review science fiction. By Grabthar's Hammer, you've managed to write a half-dozen paragraphs and have not addressed one character in the entire fucking movie. This is the series that gave us "The Inner Light", and "The City on the Edge of Forever", and you're going on about the tech like it's anything more than frilly window dressing.

          Conceptual dead we

    • Re:Wait a second... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by R3d M3rcury ( 871886 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:40PM (#42686589) Journal

      Or perhaps we'll finally see an answer to that question: "Who would win? Enterprise vs. Star Destroyer"

    • Re:Wait a second... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:44PM (#42686623) Homepage

      If they also announce that J.J. Abrams is going to direct a new Ghostbusters movie and a new Back To The Future movie, the geek universe will implode.

  • No Help (Score:5, Funny)

    by Master Moose ( 1243274 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:36PM (#42685893) Homepage

    This is not going to help explaining the differences to the Girlfriend when she says "Star Wars, Star Trek same thing..."

    "The Star Wars franchise had a series of movies starting a bit over 30 years ago. They are about to make some new ones. The guy who did Lost is going to direct them. . Where as Star Trek had a series of movies starting circa 30 years ago. They are now making new ones. The guy who did Lost directs them...""

    • Re:No Help (Score:5, Funny)

      by Grayhand ( 2610049 ) on Friday January 25, 2013 @01:34AM (#42687959)

      This is not going to help explaining the differences to the Girlfriend when she says "Star Wars, Star Trek same thing..."

      "The Star Wars franchise had a series of movies starting a bit over 30 years ago. They are about to make some new ones. The guy who did Lost is going to direct them. . Where as Star Trek had a series of movies starting circa 30 years ago. They are now making new ones. The guy who did Lost directs them...""

      The simplest way to deal with a girlfriend, assuming you have one, is to simply say have you seen the new episode of "Keeping up with the Kardashians". That should keep her busy talking for a half hour while you play Halo in your head. When there's a lull in her talking just say, "I know can you believe what happened". That should keep her going for another half hour while you finish another imaginary Halo level. If she doesn't watch that show there's always the Twilight punt. Just tell her you started reading the Twilight novels. That will buy you an hour of in head gaming before she asks your thoughts on something from the novel. I recommend your response to whatever she asked to be "Isn't it an amazing romance?" That'll buy you two hours if not the rest of the night and you might even get laid.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:40PM (#42685933)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • You forgot about Starman (which I think qualifies as a "franchise" since it had one movie, and then a spinoff TV series).

    • For the love of all that is good and right in the world, please just shut your mouth... do NOT give him ideas! :p

  • Does It Matter? (Score:3)

    by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:41PM (#42685945) Journal

    I don't really care who directs it. I'm more interested in finding out if Ford, Hamill and Fisher are going to be in it. I know they're old fogies now, but frankly after the horrors that were the prequels, I'd like nothing more than Han Solo with a blaster.

    • Re:Does It Matter? (Score:4, Informative)

      by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:25PM (#42686445) Journal

      I don't really care who directs it. I'm more interested in finding out if Ford, Hamill and Fisher are going to be in it. I know they're old fogies now, but frankly after the horrors that were the prequels, I'd like nothing more than Han Solo with a blaster.

      They have all expressed interest, and the story idea that's been floated so far has Luke being the head of a new academy. It's possible.

      Not sure if Carrie would still fit into the bikini, though.

  • Why JJ Abrams when you could get Peter Jackson? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ohnocitizen ( 1951674 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:41PM (#42685949)
    And turn Star Wars 7 into Star Wars 7, 8, and 9?

  • Now we can finally openly acknowledge it (Score:4, Funny)

    by OhANameWhatName ( 2688401 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:52PM (#42686095)
    Star Wars is lost

  • having just watched the Trek marathon on SyFy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by decora ( 1710862 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @08:56PM (#42686139) Journal

    i have to say that something has been 'lost' in the new age.

    the best original trek were about the human condition... I'm sure you can name some of your favorite episodes that leap to mind... but for me it is TOS like the Menagerie, or TNG like "The Inner Light" (where he plays the flute on) or the one about Enkidu and Gilgamesh.

    When Spock dies in Wrath of Khan, tell me you didn't cry ... now tell me even one memorably emotional scene from anything after Generations

    The new stuff is fine.. but its ... where is the heart? Maybe I'm just old but...

    • Re:having just watched the Trek marathon on SyFy (Score:5, Funny)

      by tarpitcod ( 822436 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:00PM (#42686193)

      Please. All of that TNG crap. I wanted them to die. I wanted the scene to go like this:

      Picard> Yes, but the question is *should* we kill them?
      Data> Killing is not ethical
      Blah>
      Blah>
      Blah>
        Enterprise blown from the stars

      Enemy captain> If you're going to shoot, shoot, don't talk

      • Re:having just watched the Trek marathon on SyFy (Score:4, Funny)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @11:22PM (#42687333) Journal

        The talking hapens a lot.

        [very weak ship starts shooting]
        Enterprise: hey, we've got the most powerful ship in the federation. This weak ship is shooting us. Hmmm. What shall we do?
        [ship continues to shoot]
        Enterprise: Perhaps we should shoot back.
        [ship coninues to shoot]
        [Enterprise begins to sustain damage]
        Enterprise: Yeah shooting's a good idea. Let's ignore all the photon torpedos and most of the other weapons and shoot one phaser on the weakest setting (the ship phasers don't seem to do stun on TNG).
        [ship gets shot, but sustains only moderate damage and keeps shooting]
        Enterprise: huh. That didn't do much and dang they're still shooting.
        [console on enterprise randomly expoldes]
        Enterprise: shall we shoot again? Perhaps shooting would be a good idea. Maybe we should up the phaser power from one to two percent and try again. But let's think about it for a while.
        [other ship KEEPS shooting and enterprise really starts to take the hits]
        [enterprise fires one more very weak phaser blast which does about as much as expected]
        Enterprise: huh. They're still going. OMG SHIELDS ARE FAILING EVERYBODY PANIC AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT DON'T BOTHER TO SHOOT BACK WITH EVERYTHING YOU'VE GOT!!

        and so on.

    • The problem is, Trek comes with a lot of baggage. Some of the very best original episodes literally are also some of the worst to draw from. Take 'City on the Edge of Forever' - It's brilliantly written, and has a far more mature conclusion than most TV of its time (and just about all the critics rank it highly), but it's a time travel story, and there are four other time travel stories in the original trek, with four other methods of time travel, so by the end of third season, the burning question every ep

  • Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:11PM (#42686289)

    Lost was a piece of shit. Fuck everyone who liked it. I'm going drinking.

  • This Is the Worst News I've Heard All Day (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ALeavitt ( 636946 ) <aleavitt@@@gmail...com> on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:15PM (#42686327)
    Abrams is going to take Star Wars, remove all of the substance, and turn it into a bright-colored, flashy, plotless action movie devoid of all substance.
    So basically Lucas' legacy is alive and well.

  • Just when you thought... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EmagGeek ( 574360 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:19PM (#42686379) Journal

    ... it couldn't get any fucking worse than Jar Jar Binks.

  • And the rich get richer (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:25PM (#42686437) Homepage Journal

    As an actor (and so distantly connected to the entertainment industry), what makes me cranky about this is Hollywood's affinity for known quantities. I like Abrams' work; I'm sure it'll be a fine movie.

    But there are hundreds of lesser-known directors who might have done something. What would Kevin Smith have done? Or Alfonso Cuaron, who made the third Harry Potter movie so much more interesting than any of the others? Or somebody I've never heard of?

    They're going with a known quantity, and maybe it's the right business decision. It means it probably won't be terrible, and will probably be pretty good. But no matter how good it is, it's still going to be more of Abrams, who we've already got plenty of.

    They're going with a known quantity to eliminate the risks. And all you get from safe choices is safe movies. And "safe" is exactly what Star Wars wasn't, at least not the first time, the thing that made it great.

  • AWESOME! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @09:33PM (#42686529) Homepage

    I always though that Star Wars did not have enough lens flares...

    Why cant they have Michael Bay do it? We would have Ewoks exploding all over the place, and everyone's wish comes true... Exploding Jar Jar...

  • That he butchered Star Trek gives me hope... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @10:46PM (#42687079) Journal

    I'm basically the Trekkie the Onion lampoons: "Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film as 'Fun, Watchable.'" [theonion.com]

    It was a really fun film to watch, with action and adventure and cute one-liners. A fun, summer action movie. But it was not Star Trek.

    Star Trek is not about good versus evil. Star Trek is about Better versus Base. There is no 'evil' in the Star Trek universe, there's just other intelligent life who are different or frightened or struggling and the easy response is "blow 'em up!" but Star Trek asks its characters to be better than that and find another option. Yes, defend yourself, but always look for the other, peaceful solution to a problem. And the best part about Star Trek is that the heroes are...us. Us as we could be through science and reason and strength of character.

    The 2009 JJ Abrams movie threw all that out the window and gave us a spectacle about a genocidal bad guy with a scary looking ship who must be stopped by punching. Fun movie, but it's not Star Trek, as it doesn't ask its characters or the audience to rise above being a base reactionary.

    Star Wars, which I also very much enjoy, is a mystical fantasy of good "Chosen One" characters versus Evil so evil they call themselves "The Dark Side." And the moral choice presented is about the stupidest philosophy imaginable, that if you care about people, you will come to hate the people who want to hurt the people you care about, which will make you "fall" and then join up with the people you hate to kill the people you cared about. I get the idea that blind hatred can make you "no better than" your enemies, but it doesn't turn you into your enemies. Just to godwin's law this, yes, it's possible to hate Hitler SO MUCH for killing all those Jews that you start a genocidal campaign against Germans, putting them in concentration camps and gas chambers, and wind up no better than Hitler. You become what you hated. But in the Star Wars universe, if you love the Jews and hate Hitler, you wind up joining Hitler to kill more Jews, thereby become THE SAME AS Hitler. This is stupid and makes no sense.

    So, JJ Abrams abandoned the fundamental premise of Star Trek (that we can rise above our base instincts to find peaceful solutions to our problems) and ruined Star Trek in a bad way. Maybe, in charge of the next Star Wars movie, he'll abandon the fundamental premise of Star Wars (that you have to be a dispassionate mystical robot to avoid killing your friends) and make the franchise much better and more interesting.

  • Gravity (Score:3)

    by aquabat ( 724032 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @11:15PM (#42687287) Journal
    I think, all the slapstick stuff with Han Solo (which was great stuff, BTW) aside, the Star Wars universe has a sense of gravity and realism that the Star Trek universe has always lacked. I think this has a lot to do with the differences between the cinema and television media, and the associated differences between the two cultures. Abrams is definitely a television person, and there will always be that "campy" element to his work (inside jokes, flashy camera effects, etc), regardless of how entertaining it might be to watch. His take on Star Trek was a lot of fun, and visually, it was really great, but you never forget that you are in a theatre, watching a movie. Star Wars, on the other hand, (at least the original ones) transported me into their world in a way that few films have done for me since then. There is a term: "willing suspension of disbelief", which applies here. I have that for Abrams' Star Trek, but I didn't need it for Star Wars or Empire; it was almost unconscious there. I got a similar feeling of that gravity with Dark Horse's original "Tales of the Jedi" series, but things that work in one medium don't always translate to another medium. I guess what I'm saying is that atmosphere is a hard thing to get right, and I don't think Abrams is going to be able to capture it properly. I'm sure it'll be entertaining, but it won't have the depth we all want it to have.

  • Retirement (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sperbels ( 1008585 ) on Thursday January 24, 2013 @11:36PM (#42687415)
    It's time to retire both frachises. I'm sick of both of them. Let's have something new.

  • An amazing coincidence! (Score:5, Funny)

    by bobdevine ( 825603 ) on Friday January 25, 2013 @01:08AM (#42687865)

    Is it true that J.J. Abrams real name is Jar Jar?

  • All about the merchandising... (Score:3)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Friday January 25, 2013 @03:59AM (#42688595)
    and refreshing the "product" with new characters to make toys of..

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