We don't always agree, but we can both unite under a common cause.

This won't be popular, but I LOVED his first two Trek movies. Acting was on point without making a caricature of the original people. The call backs in the Kahn movie were great. Both were exciting, engaging, all that.
I have no idea what happened in the third movie. Tried to watch it 4 times. Still never finished it, can't tell you a thing about it.
Begin my punishment. My body is ready.
- I definitely enjoyed the movies, but at the risk of sounding like a gatekeeper, they didn't really feel like Trek. It felt more to me like an action sci-fi in the vein of, say, Avatar, with a coat of Trek paint to lure the fans in.
  Still enjoyable, mind you, but not really something I remember when I think of the Trek universe.
  
  The '09 Star Trek movie, judged on its merits as a Star Trek movie, was a pretty good Star Wars movie.
  
  I agree they're not Trek, but they are much closer than any show after Enterprise.
- No I completely agree with you. Without those first two Abrams Trek movies, I probably wouldn’t have ever watched any of the Trek shows.
  Him and Rian Johnson fucked Star Wars though. Completely ruined it for me and I refuse to watch any new Star Wars content.
  
  I will honestly say that, as someone who did not like Rogue One (I seem to be in a small minority), Andor was one of the best sci-fi series I'd seen in a while. I recommend watching it. It's only barely related to the rest of Star Wars. There's no Force or Jedi in it.
- I hated the 2009 movie and Into Darkness, but Beyond was okay-ish.
  (Apparently unlike you, I care about ridiculous plot holes so big they destroy the entire premise of Star Trek -- after all, (a) how is Starfleet anything but a farce if a mutinous cadet can be promoted straight to captain, (b) what's the point of starships if you can just beam between star systems, and c) what's the point of any dramatic conflict if you can fuckin' cure death?!)
  
  (a) how is Starfleet anything but a farce if a mutinous cadet can be promoted straight to captain
  Pike tagging Kirk like that jolted me right out of the first movie. Just... no. I still found it enjoyable overall, but the contrivances really detracted from the experience.
  
  what’s the point of any dramatic conflict if you can fuckin’ cure death?!)
  To be fair, Into Darkness isn't the only Trek thing to have that problem. Lower Decks even makes the relative ease with which main characters return from the dead a plot point.
  
  I agree the films aren’t good trek but they’re still a fun watch, imo, if you keep them in context. If start trek was an action franchise, they’d be presentable outings.
- The third one was just…fine. Like I’m so ambivalent towards it, I don’t have any feeling about it.
  
  I was the same, can't remember it now but it was said to be the best by a lot of people.
  Khan was a mockery because of the takeout and magic blood.
- "on point and not a caricature" you say? https://youtu.be/k9vHopyEtzs?si=nBc7zRs0h29MNMl
  
  Right? I like Zachary Quinto as an actor, but that Spock was not Spock. And yes, I know, the Kelvin Event changed everything... so why not just invent new characters instead of shoehorning new personalities into beloved ones?
- Just a small nitpick: Star Trek Beyond was directed by Justin Lin, not Abrams, and was written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung. Abrams only produced.
- The first one was pretty great, I couldn't get through the second though and actually heard good things about the third. The second put me off even trying the third.
  
  As incentive to watch it, Abrams had no involvement with Beyond and it was basically a Simon Pegg production, and Pegg genuinely loves Trek.
- Agreed.
  Also, I don’t hate the SW 7-9 any more than the previous six. They are sci-fi spectacles and none of them were brilliant pieces of writing. Plot holes and magic galore.

Lost and Star Wars are unforgivable sins.
- Early Lost was solid. Then, we got the other "others," they killed off the best character, and the ending everybody predicted (which was vehemently denied) totally happened.
  
  I said this elsewhere in the thread. I was with Lost all the way to the end. I kept thinking, "okay, we will get answers." And then we got to the final episode. Most of the mysteries were not answered and the ones that were did not get very good answers.
  It pissed me off as much as the last episode of BSG pissed me off for the same "let's just throw everything we've built out the window, fuck it" reason.
  
  Wasn't Abrams only involved with the production of the pilot and then minimally involved with the first season? From my understanding he pretty much had no involvement and Damien Lindelof had to scratch teeth to try and get some insight on where to go forward.
  Then between the writers strikes and well...

Competent Director, and completely incompetent story teller. Just like Rian Johnson!
- I think you got that the wrong way around
  
  No, Rian Johnson is a pretty shit storyteller as well.
  A competent storyteller would have seen that Carrie Fisher died, looked at the release window of the movie, with a full year left, and then ordered a single reshoot to kill Leia off instead of pulling a Space Merry Poppins.
  He also completely abandoned Finn's Force potential in favor of whatever the fuck that casino raid was.
  And then there was the noble sacrifice that Finn was going to make, which was foiled because he decided that Finn should have a love interest, but didn't lay any of the groundwork for it, and the sacrifice could have actually saved the day.
  So instead, he invents the hyperspace kamikaze.
  Honestly, that entire movie felt like a long filler sequence. The stakes never actually changed, and there was no payoff of anything. It was a placeholder movie, only meant to be the second in a trilogy. And the fans hated it so much that the last movie spent a good amount of runtime retconning it all.
  
  How do you figure that?

Oooh yes. it wasn't enough to lens flare any joy out of one of my beloved star franchises, you just had to snoke your way into two of them! If you lay hands on Stargate now as well, I'll go auldimately insane!
- If you lay hands on Stargate now as well
  Wait, no. What?
  Is this a thing that's been talked about?

The problem is he makes decent-to-good original films then slaps a thin veneer of franchise on it. Zero respect for what he's actually making a movie of.

His constant hurling of "mystery boxes" at us was annoying enough. Things like Luke's lightsaber and Maz Kanata's "that is a story for another time"... really? REALLY? Abrams had no backstory for this, at all, he just threw it in there as a fetishistic compulsion, along with so many other things. Which is why none of his stories land in the end.
Speaking of which, then there's his ending TFA in the middle of a scene, as if this was an episode of "Lost" and stay tuned for next week's installment, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.
But the clincher for me is the completely lazy disregard for science and how science works. Instead of doing the homework to at least try to approximate reality, he just did whatever got him to the next page of the saccharine script, to put whatever characters together because it was convenient for him.
In the process of all this, he made the galaxy feel small and flat, instead of vast and grandiose.

We as a culture need to realize that JJ Abrams is just a less edgy Michael Bay.
They both take beloved franchises and do everything they can to kill any interest the old fans have while failing to make something new and interesting for the younger fans. Then they fall back on the aesthetic of the old parts of the franchise, without any of the charm, and keep the same story structure and bad jokes as their new version of the franchise.

I'm conflicted with Abrams. I actually liked The Force Awakens and thought it had alot of potential (despite the seemingly unoriginal story), though JJ Abrams seems to have a history of starting things he can't seem to finish on his own. Last Jedi went off the rails and Rise of Skywalker was just trash. I just want to know who the hell in Disney thought it was a good idea to move ahead with the Sequel trilogy without a clear story or plan on how to proceed with the trilogy? Ultimately Kathleen Kennedy greenlit that shit, so I think she's to blame, but how in the hell does one of the biggest entertainment companies on the planet agree to something like that without it being worked out in advance. At a time when some movie series were getting filmed back-to-back-to-back, how in the hell did they not have a cohesive story figured out beforehand?

But Fringe was amazing!
- Fringe started amazing, then hit the wall fucking hard in the final season. Classic Abrams. Even he didn't know what was really going on and when he had to start explaining shit it fell apart in a right hurry. See Lost for further examples.
  
  The only show that ever did time travel right was Continuum.
  
  True, I feel like they were forced to conclude everything too quickly, and they should have done some more monster of the week episodes.

I honestly don't mind his movies. Movie Trek has always been action for the most part anyways and, also, would kind of fuck up the characters. Hell First Contact turned Picard into a mentally unhinged action hero.
Also I still say Kirk being a rocker fucking fits yo.
- Also I still say Kirk being a rocker fucking fits yo.
  Except that it's like calling you a rocker because you listen to Vivaldi. Star Trek used to pretend music ended with classical. Then J.J. decided to pretend it ended with the Beastie Boys.
  Now don't get me wrong, I like the Beastie Boys and Sabotage is a terrific song... but it would be a weird quirk like Alex listening to Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange, not a sign that he's a rockin' rebel.
  
  Eh true, but you hit on what drove me so fucking crazy in...basically all of it. The only listen to music thats already classic by our standards. Music thats classic by our standards. I hated that.
- Movie Trek has always been action for the most part anyways
  The Motion Picture and The Voyage Home.
  ...and, also, would kind of fuck up the characters. Hell First Contact turned Picard into a mentally unhinged action hero.
  Picard always had that possibility inside him. After all, that sort of behavior is why he had an artificial heart. I thought that scene in First Contact worked amazingly well, TBH.
  (If anything, the unrealistic portrayal of Picard is how he was immediately mostly back to normal after The Best of Both Worlds, as if it never even happened.)
  
  Those are two examples of when it wasn't just action which really fits with what I said about how it's only for the most part usually just action.
  But okay I'll admit you have a point about Picard
  
  I'd say after Family, the following episode, but you're right otherwise.

- JJ is great at build up Mystery boxes. He can craft this big world changing question and hype around it all.
  Then, when it comes time to open the box, you find that it's a pair of old gym socks with more holes than sock.
  You then find out that he spent the entire writing budget on more lens flares.
  
  Or: When it’s time to open the box, be denies the box ever existed.
- He created Fringe, so I'll give him that.
  
  Fringe is better then Lost and ill die on this hill.
- Lost was the fucking worst. I regret watching it.
  
  I was honestly okay with it right up to the last episode. Then suddenly it was "the island is fixable with a cork" and "everyone's in heaven" and "no, we're never answering any of those other mysteries," the end.
- I really liked Super 8 when I saw it in theaters but I haven’t watched it since then
  
  It was okay. I wouldn't call it exceptional. Out of the many sci-fi films that came out in 2011, it was one of them.

I'm ok with his Star Trek movies because he admitted to not having liked Star Trek or watched much of it until he got the job as director for it, and he at least watched enough to learn that he could set it in an alternate timeline that doesn't fuck with the main shit that people actually like; making it super easy to ignore.
- Except he did fuck with it because now the Kelvin Incident is canon. And destroying Romulus with a big red blob is bullshit.

I don't know if he is any good as I can't get past the generic plots and can't see anything but lens flare.
- Heh. J.J. Abrams and lens flare, meet your match, Zack Snyder and Slow-Mo
  
  There is indeed a school of cinema devoted to that.
- All he has are those two things and mystery boxes that are empty.
  JJ is a hype man with nothing to support it quality wise, but he does seem to make things that make money so Hollywood loves him.

I'll never forgive him for undoing Rian Johnson's work on Star Wars. Johnson's take was more on line with Lucas'.
- Exactly. TFA was great! But it was just a rehash of ANH at the end of the day. Abrams set up a bunch of questions in a trilogy that was going to have different directors.
  Then Johnson gave some answers, as you'd expect. And however you feel about TLJ, Abrams actively made things worse when he was brought back for RoS. He said fuck those answers, I'm going to ignore that whole movie and "somehow, Palpatine returns" instead and redo RotJ.
  Even worse he fucked up the whole series with his force healing and resurrection. A monastic warrior order focused on peace somehow forgot about ~~the iron fleet~~ using the force to heal people. He invented force dyads, which are somehow more powerful than someone who was fathered by the Force. Kylo and Rey can resurrect each other, but Anakin couldn't resurrect Padme? He fell to the dark side over a possibility he could've totally fixed?
  Abrams basically said Anakin wasn't the chosen one and that he was insignificant. That's a far bigger sin than anything Johnson did.
  
  I mean... the "chosen one" thing was really something the series didn't need in the first place but I agree in all other points.
- He deserves a lot of the blame for fumbling that landing badly, but I also suspect he didn't have the kind of freedom that Johnson had, and he had to keep the studio happy above all. I can't imagine the pressure and interference he must have had to deal with on that film. I can only hope that the studio learned a lesson from that that when you squeeze your artists too hard, all you get is shit.

Dude always reminds me of an IRL Vorta.

I love his non fandom stuff, but the major franchises should have kept him far away from them, he should just stick to original content.

Nah. I love both TFA and ST'09.
Episode 9 and Into Darkness were not good.
Mission Impossible III and Super 8 were pretty good. He's a brilliant idea man who can direct great action scenes and interesting characters. His weakness is on the follow-through. Just stop giving him sequels and let him direct original stories.