Randall wrote:It was my understanding that JJ didn't actually know Star Trek at all, and really wanted to do Star Wars all along. And you can tell. His Trek films don't adhere to the basic emphasis of Trek TV.
Still, I enjoyed the first JJ Trek a lot, finding it quite entertaining, though one really needs to read the comic book prequel "Countdown" to make sense of it. (And it's a great story, too.) I hated the second one, which didn't try hard enough to be Nu Trek, lamely homaging Star Trek II to death.
When we get the expected joke where young Kirk actually
does "make it with a green-skinned (Orion) girl", I suspected we were not perhaps in the presence of a 100% sincere Trek fan.
Still, we know he was enough of a fan to think the young-Kirk canon revolved around every line from Wrath of Khan. But darn, he forgot to have Cpt. Pike pardon Kirk's test-cheating with a "commendation for original thinking" at the end of the first movie.
JJ's Star Wars film was filled with fan service and regurgitation... and yet I loved it. It was just such a relief after the prequels. But it was important for SW to go in a new direction after that, which TLJ did, to mixed results.
As Mad Magazine put it, "Twenty years ago, fans complained about Jar-Jar, now we complain about JJ."
