If you don’t know who Rick Berman is, than you will never understand why so many old Trekkies now hate J.J. Abrams.
Rick Berman was the producer of Star Trek The Next Generation, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek Enterprise, and the Star Trek The Next Generation Movies. Instead of being a figure of love and admiration like Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry, Rick Berman is viewed by most Star Trek fans as the Anti-Christ who did his damned best to destroy everything that made Star Trek great. J.J.Abrams must have him on speed dial.
Over the past few days I’ve killed the random moment reading the many blog posts and movie reviews talking the many, many things that are wrong with Star Trek Into Darkness. Among the many complaints are things like stealing storylines from older Star Trek story lines, making the Federation more war like and less Dora the Explorer, and ignoring what made Star Trek great in the first place-a lot of deep thinking and introspection on moral issues. Sounds a lot like what was being said during the glory days of Rick Berman’s often dark, militaristic, and plot stealing Star Trek.
For all you kiddies who weren’t even born 25 years ago when Star Trek The Next Generation ended it’s run, there were a number of damned good shows and a lot of so-so shows and a whole season of pure crap shows. Even Rick Berman got a couple of dozen great shows out the 624 or so episodes of Star Trek filmed during his rein of terror. So there is some hope that J.J.Abrams might get one great movie banged out, but we may have to wait three or four films before it shows up.
I liked Alias, LOST, and Fringe-in their first couple of seasons. Abrams is great at getting things going, but totally sucks at wrapping things up. The build up for Cloverfield was amazing, the film, not so much. So it makes sense that his first Star Trek was pretty good and his second Star Trek was pretty much one WTF moment after another. Again, if you’re a kid who spends ten seconds on every web page you visit-and left this page long ago-than you don’t know about those hundreds of hours of Star Trek that have gone before. Who the hell has the time to sit down and watch all of that? There are plenty of episodes I never care to see again, and I am a fan, though often a nitpicking one.
Which brings us back to Rick Berman, why we love to hate the man who brought us countless hours of fun-so much of Star Trek just doesn’t make any damned sense at all. I’m guessing that fans of CSI or Law&Order don’t have every plot stored away in their brain somewhere that they can cross reference with the hundreds of hours of each of those shows. It’s a show you watch for an hour and are happy when they catch the bad guy. Star Trek is more than that. Star Trek is more like the longest novel ever written, while I don’t keep every episode on instant recall, I do recognize most of them after a few minutes of viewing.
So yeah, J.J.Abrams is the new Anti-Christ. Rick Berman can sleep sound knowing that his Mantle has been passed on.
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To satisfy my own morbid curiousity I decided to investigate this “Fringe” series which Abrams and his “team” were famous for…
Banal dialogue and crude dialogue packed around the entire gamount of their trademarks: non-stop running around, screaming, rapid-cuts, shakey cam, lens flares, glares, an explosion…all in the first ten minutes or so of the pilot episode, complete with a cheap sex scene And a high-ranking Black guy with an attitude problem (to cover the politically-correct spot) And gruesome skin dropping off of a plane load of people! Within the next hour were the usual gag one-liners dropped here and there, plus a cheap excuse for the Scully-wanna-be character to strip down to her undies (Just Like Carol Marcus would do in Abrams 2: Into Darkness)… This to lead into a dream sequence so they could justify constant lens flares, rapid-cuts, and another explosion–lots more noise! Afterwards came the usual car chases/crashes, foot chases, and much more shaky cam. Scene-establishing logo text which pop-out at the viewers.
Theatrical exposition Everywhere. Not much plot. Super-shallow characters. Plus generally bad acting all-around and completly incompetent scripts which Require all this exposition to divert viewers away from the vacuous garbage. Not to mention Bad Science, wall-to-wall. But they’ll keep dropping-in intelligent-sounding tech catch-phrases, so that’s Okay to make it passable for the average
person who doesn’t know any better. That’s where series are Aimed for now: ignorant masses. That’s how trash like “The Big Bang Theory” become popular: by coating it to Look intelligent when under the surface it’s pure garbage. Image is everything. Visual is everything. And that’s exactly what the average moron-on-the-street responds to.
Much like with Abrams’ Star Trek: pluck a few items from The Encyclopedia and litter them around the script–fans’ll be pleased. Sure.
Fringe was dead-on just like Abrams’ Trek disaster on the small screen, but in this case instead of doing “Star Trek for Dummies” it was “The X-Files for Dummies.” X-Files for the OCD generation or for idiots. Probably both. It’s such a blatant ripoff of The “X-Files” that it mimes the title sequence right down to a cheap copy of the music!
But if you cater to this class of people, and they’re the ones doing all the voting, and they control the media, Abrams and friends can become stars–which is exactly what happened. This is the future of “Science Fiction”–It’s Fantasy and Comic Book crap, heroes vs. villains. Nice and Simple and Dumb.
But that’s what the average Amercan wants these days: not to think, just to Watch Pretty Visuals.
“Jay Jay” doesn’t know what Science Fiction is. More to the point his “team” of Orci et al are just as Lost and vacuous. No surprise that they’re a bunch of young kids who Sound and Act like teenagers on the commentaries. They were all born After the original Star Trek series aired, and grew up watching the likes of “The Phantom Menace” to draw inspiration from. So it’s no wonder they’re the “creative team” behind the likes of “Armageddon” and the “Transformers” movies–they are writing For Kids!
Hmm, tell us what you really think…
Fringe was always a knock off of The X-Files, and your correct on all your other points as well. The sad bit of business is that J.J. Abrams is the Heir Apparent to the likes of Lucas, Spielberg, and even Kubrick-there just aren’t any Great Directors out there-and all the good Directors are either old white guys who will soon be dead or more young over-rated guys like Abrams.
Maybe things will get better-but I doubt it. As you say, everyone who enters the field from now on will have grown up watching nothing but junk.