J.J. Abrams and the cautionary tale for a generation of filmmakers raised on nostalgia
Audience appetite for nostalgia – which may not be as voracious as the studios believe it to be – has reached a point where lifelong fans are now directing the franchises they grew up watching. J.J. Abrams has built his entire feature-length directorial career on that sentiment, in what could be a worrying sign of things to come.
Of course, the idea of somebody taking the reins on the adaptation of a property they’ve adored for decades is hardly out of the ordinary, with Sam Raimi a childhood devotee of Spider-Man before helming the original trilogy. Of course, he was already an established filmmaker with his own signature style long before then, but Abrams is indicative of what could potentially happen when that’s no longer the case.
On the small screen, he’s been responsible for the award-winning likes of Felicity and Alias, the cultural phenomenon Lost, and the cult favourite Fringe, while his executive producorial credits include the sorely underrated Person of Interest, the Stephen King universe’s Castle Rock, the acclaimed Lovecraft Country, and reality-warping sci-fi Westworld. It is hardly the work of a total hack, quite the opposite, in fact, but his film credits are nowhere near as inspiring.
Tom Cruise hand-picked him to make his feature-length debut on Mission: Impossible III because he was a fan of Alias, and it goes without saying it was a sequel. Next up was Star Trek, which was a solid reboot. He followed that up with Super 8, which may have been original in terms of not adapting any pre-existing source material, but it was nothing more than Abrams paying tribute to Steven Spielberg and the Amblin era of coming-of-age genre films.
Star Trek Into Darkness effectively remade The Wrath of Khan, Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a re-tread of George Lucas’ 1977 original, and The Rise of Skywalker was completely rebuilt from the ground up because Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi proved so polarising, with Lucasfilm determining Abrams to be the safest pair of hands to right the ship and inject it with even more nods, winks, call-backs, and nostalgia.
The latest rumours sweeping the online sphere – which are yet to be substantiated, never mind confirmed – have offered that Abrams’ next port of call could be a time-travelling adventure that homages Back to the Future. Even if it’s not true, it’s indicative of what could be a perilous future for blockbuster cinema as the old guard ages out and the next batch of wide-eyed talents step into the breach with no ideas of their own.
It’s not just that Abrams has never directed a movie that’s original, fresh, exciting, unique, or completely unburdened from and untethered to the things he grew up watching in any way; it’s that at no point has he ever shown any interest in doing so. He signed a $250million development deal with Warner Bros in 2019 and has so far delivered nothing, with his ambitions wielding the megaphone seemingly limited to stuffing his and the audience’s mouths full of member berries.
Some projects have been floated before being canned, though, but what were they? Overlook, a scrapped prequel to The Shining. Zatanna, Constantine, Justice League Dark, and a standalone Superman film alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates, all comic book adaptations. There’s no impetus to do anything even remotely original, and this is a guy who gets paid millions of dollars for his creative input.
The gulf between independent film and the Hollywood machine is growing ever wider, making it increasingly difficult for directors who aren’t at the top of the tree to keep one foot in each world. Cinema is an industry where one hand constantly feeds the other, and if the people making the biggest movies worship at the altar of nostalgia and benefit from it accordingly, then there’s a lesser need to follow other avenues that stretch the limits of creativity.
If the overreliance on nostalgia to drive the biggest and most expensive productions continues following the template laid down by Abrams and those of a similar mindset, then there’s an entire generation who’ll be encouraged and emboldened to chase the nostalgic dragon at the expense of even contemplating something different. By extension, everything will become even more formulaic and homogenised than it already is, and what was once old will become new again in a never-ending cycle of staleness.