Edit this: What is the uniqueness of J.J. Abrams' talent
J. J. Abrams, the savior of big Hollywood franchises, the "heir" and just a friend of Steven Spielberg, the creator of the cult "Stay Alive", the director of the highest-grossing blockbuster in the history of the United States, will celebrate his 60th birthday on June 27. He doesn't have any Oscars, but he shot "Mission.": Impossible 3", two parts of "Star Trek" and two of "Star Wars". He has an impeccable reputation and a somewhat tragic career. Izvestia analyzes the phenomenon of J. J. Abrams' success and his creative method, around which many copies have been broken over the past quarter century.
How did J.J. Abrams' career begin?
Most people know J.J. Abrams from the TV series "Stay Alive" and his participation in the "Mission" franchises.: impossible", "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" and the movie "Super 8". But there are other legendary works associated with the name of this amazing man. "Shrek" and "Armageddon", "The World of the Wild West" and the "Monstro" series. And this is not counting the huge number of smaller-scale projects, but always of exceptional quality. There aren't many people in Hollywood with more authority than J.J. Abrams. And even the fact that his business has been somewhat sluggish in recent years does not spoil the weather. The problem is not only that Abrams is simply not very lucky, but also that they are waiting for another powerful breakthrough from him, which will turn the industry around again and begin a new milestone in popular culture.
J.J. Abrams played a role in the movie "She-Devil"
The uniqueness of J.J. Abrams is that, unlike his idol and friend Steven Spielberg, he is not an Author. Not a man who makes up a story and tells it to the whole world. He has no philosophy other than the philosophy of lenses, rhythm, and visual effects. J.J. Abrams Is The Editor. And what is an ideal editor? This is a person who feels the author in the most subtle way and helps him to express his thought as effectively as possible so that it can also reach the target audience as effectively as possible. Abrams has been doing just that for most of his career. He rarely knew what he wanted to say, but he clearly understood how to do it in order to conquer the global film distribution.
It all started with a love of cinema, a mad passion that Abrams still has. Jeffrey Jacob Abrams is the son of major television producer Gerald W. Abrams, in whose projects Michael J. Abrams starred. Fox, Mickey Rourke, Alec Baldwin, and even Ingrid Bergman. Jeffrey's mother, Carol Ann Abrams, was also a producer. Since childhood, he has not only been sick of movies, but he has always tried to shoot himself with a small Super 8 camera, preferring horror and fiction to other genres. His favorite paintings were (and still are) "Star Wars", "Jaws", "Window to the courtyard". He also loves Tootsie and The Philadelphia Story, but still his own cinema tends to be more like the first three of these films.
Directed by Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams
As a teenager, Abrams, along with his friend Matt Reeves (who also later became an influential cinematographer), sent another amateur tape to the competition. She was awarded a prize, and then a miracle happened. The 16-year-old Abrams was found by Steven Spielberg, who also shot on eight-millimeter film in his youth and was now looking for someone who could disassemble and restore his archives. He offered Abrams a job, and Abrams, of course, accepted.: That's how their friendship began, which has been going on for more than 40 years.
Abrams immediately began to work a lot and in all directions. He composed music for films, wrote scripts one after another, based on which films with Jim Belushi, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson were shot. But Abrams was barely 20 years old by that time. He also did animation development for the first Shrek. He was one of the authors of the script for "Armageddon" with Bruce Willis, the iconic 1998 blockbuster.
"Star Trek" and "Star Wars" by J.J. Abrams
The breakthrough for Abrams eventually happened not in the cinema, but on television. He became the showrunner of "Stay Alive," a series that is still rightfully considered one of the most important shows of the 21st century. For six seasons, each episode became a super event, with fans arguing, coming up with concepts one more bizarre than the other, and trying to figure out what was behind the story, which outwardly seemed to reproduce the events of Julvern's "Mysterious Island."
A shot from the TV series "Stay Alive"
Many people compare this series with the works of Stephen King, but it's not for nothing that Abrams has Alfred Hitchcock among his favorite authors. Hitchcock introduced the concept of "macguffin" into cinema — it's a kind of mystery that drives the plot, creates atmosphere, intrigue, suspense. At the same time, it may remain undisclosed, because it has already fulfilled its function: it hooked us so that we watched the film to the end. Abrams calls his McGuffin a mysterious box. The viewer must constantly wonder what's inside.
In "Lost," everything is shrouded in this feeling, and the viewer needs to guess what is really happening on the island. When the series answered this question, it turned out that few people were satisfied with the answer, and many lesser mysteries simply turned out to be unsolved, as if Abrams hadn't bothered to do so. It was more important for him to engage than to build a coherent, consistent system in which answers bring catharsis. The process, the form, is more interesting for Abrams — and here he has no equal.
An image from the movie "Mission Impossible: The Phantom Protocol"
Hollywood understood this, and Abrams' career as an "editor" began. His feature-length debut was the third film in the Mission series.: impossible." Tom Cruise called Abrams to bring life to the picture, as he was not happy with the second part, which was shot by the legendary John Woo. And Abrams started editing. He made Ethan Hunt more human, more vulnerable, and gave him a personal life—and the audience reacted with delight. He reinforced the role of Hunt's team and brought in comedian Simon Pegg. He got Philip Seymour Hoffman to make his supervillain truly creepy, not a caricature or a parody. He made the rhythm more nervous: he has a lot of glues, a lot of manual camera. And there is a MacGuffin in the form of a Rabbit's Foot artifact. Since then, Abrams has not directed "Missions," but he has set the vector along which the series has been moving ever since.
The next stage of this work was the resurrection of the "Star Trek" franchise, which had become entrenched in the monumental canon. The giant fanbase around the world was overfed with this content, besides, it was getting old, and watching classic Star Trek movies and TV series in the noughties was already a bit strange. It was too heavy, too slow, and I didn't want to understand the "lore" at all, no matter how deep it was.
A shot from the movie "Star Trek"
Abrams, who was not a Star Trek fan at all, picked out the main thing from there. This is the spaceship Enterprise, led by the smart and daring Captain Kirk (still Chris Pine's best role) and his right-hand man, the intellectual Spock, under whose outward equanimity strong passions rage. And this is their mission — to surf the universe, performing humanitarian tasks on bizarre planets. Abrams "rejuvenated" the team, shortened the dialogues, multiplied the action, added a lot of humor and romance. He started everything all over again — his film was simply called "Star Trek", although this is the 11th full meter of the franchise. As a result, the blockbuster brought a new generation of fans, although the old one squinted with displeasure and asked if it was too similar to Star Wars.
And Abrams was unanimously recognized as the savior of the franchise. Moreover, his method cannot be imitated, because the main secret here is an impeccable sense of style. And, perhaps, incredible empathy. Here's a simple detail. Abrams wanted Star Trek to look like it was shot on a handheld camera, which is generally his favorite effect, which reached its peak in the Monstro mockumentary. But the blockbuster was shot on IMAX equipment! This is the exact opposite of manual photography. And then Abrams began shaking these huge cameras with his hand. Just himself — he didn't trust anyone else, there are a lot of videos where he does it. And look at the result: the action in this technological blockbuster is similar to a TV report, only it is played on a screen the size of a multi-storey building. It seems simple, but the solution turned out to be brilliant. The film was even the first in the entire series to win an Oscar, though for makeup. And yet.
A frame from the movie "Monstro"
Next up is Star Wars. Rather, before them, the movie "Super 8" happened, also a successful and "editorial" project that returns to the aesthetics of Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the third degree" and "Alien". But for the industry, "Star Wars" was especially important: a risk worth billions of dollars. Disney had just bought the entire franchise from George Lucas and had high hopes for it, but the reputation of the Star Wars movie series was tarnished by the second trilogy. An editor was needed, which, of course, became Abrams. He has achieved incredible things: "The Force Awakens" looks like this is exactly what Lucas once conceived of "Star Wars", but could not remove due to technological limitations. There is a spirit here that filled the original trilogy, there is a new look at the same character system. And even the old characters themselves appear — to the stormy applause of the audience. At the same time, the main character is a girl quite in the spirit of the new age, as well as a black actor in one of the key roles. There is a "young Darth Vader" by Kylo Ren. There is a new "MacGuffin" — the revival of the Sith Order and their plans.
"The Force Awakens" still holds the record for box office receipts in North America — $936 million. The film grossed $2 billion worldwide: it failed to catch up with Avatar and Titanic, and is now in fifth place. It was an absolute success for Abrams, he began to seem to everyone like a kind of industry doctor who has a cure for all the diseases that lead to failure. And therefore, when the production of the blockbuster "Star Wars: Skywalker. Sunrise" was questionable, and other films in the franchise did not always turn out to be a triumph, it was Abrams who was urgently called to save the project. And the ambulance, of course, arrived, but still a little late.
A still from the movie "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"
Technically, Sunrise is not a failure. And yet, his fees were two times lower than those of the "Rebirth of Power". And most importantly, it exposed something that Hollywood seemed to have refused to acknowledge for a long time. Exactly what we were talking about at the very beginning.: that Abrams is an editor, not an author. The new Star Wars trilogy had an ideal form, but there was no content, no spirit, no philosophy. The film grossed a billion worldwide, but for many years after that, Disney did not dare to release new full meters. Because it became clear that the force had awakened, but it could not tell the world anything. And this feeling was so clear that a difficult chapter in Abrams' life began—and has not yet ended.
What is J.J. Abrams doing now?
Everything seemed to be fine. In September 2019, even before the release of Voskhod, Abrams and his company Bad Robot signed a five-year contract with WarnerMedia totaling $250 million. It was assumed that he would now overwhelm HBO and Warner Bros., which are part of the holding. original projects that will bring millions of views online and billions of dollars at the box office. And then there was the pandemic, then Hollywood went on strike, and Abrams' list of unrealized projects began to expand rapidly.
A still from the movie "Star Wars: Skywalker. Sunrise"
This is not to say that there were no ideas. There was a prequel project for "The Shining" based on Stephen King, there was a proposal to create an anthology series with King based on his works and to film his novel "Billy Summers", there was an idea to make a series in the DC universe based on "Justice League". Black Superman, Zatanna, and Madame X are also from DC. Abrams tried to push through a project based on Hot Wheels toys, and work began on the fantasy western Pinkerton.
And for some reason, everything did not coalesce. Bad Robot did have some small releases: the very cute short cartoon "Boy, Mole, Fox and Horse", the action movie "Lou" for Netflix, the animated series "Batman: The Caped Crusader". But this is not at all what was expected from a super cinematographer of Abrams' level. HBO released the series "Duster" in 2025, but the public received it cautiously, and there will already be a second season. Abrams' full-length production film "On the Edge of Oak Street" starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor is due to be released in August, but it seems that no one is really waiting for him.
Now Abrams will celebrate his anniversary and begin preparing for the first truly big premiere in many years. On November 12, The Great Beyond will be released, a full—length project for IMAX, where Abrams is the screenwriter, producer and director for the first time since Sunrise. Starring Glen Powell, Jenna Ortega, Samuel L. Jackson and Emma Mackie, but very little is known about the film, not even a trailer.
A shot from the movie "Super 8"
Abrams showed the industrial audience a teaser at CinemaCon, from which it is clear that science fiction awaits us, there is a hint of some big mystery, and it looks like Steven Spielberg's Super 8 and sci-fi films. Abrams himself remains silent. In recent years, he has generally spoken little in public, avoided interviews and waited in the wings. Obviously, this is a risk for him, and if a failure occurs in November, a once flawless career could go downhill.
On the other hand, there are quite a few franchises that need a fresh "editorial" look from Abrams right now. The Marvel line of the Avengers and others like them needs to be rethought, we need to find a way to bring Bond back beautifully, we want to see new Transformers, and Jurassic Park needs to be updated. Plus the X-Men, plus Indiana Jones, but there are also video games that almost always have bad adaptations. By the way, Abrams has been eyeing this kind of art for a long time. Therefore, if the original blockbuster doesn't work out, this super professional will have enough work for a long time. And the "mystery boxes" too.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
