Originally Posted by
godisawesome
I want to argue that there’s actually nothing wrong with “nostalgia-based” storytelling, and that by the same token, there’s nothing inherently good about “original” storytelling; a corollary would be that complaining about remakes and reboots is a tired bit of whining if you pretend it’s a wholly modern phenomenon, and usually is just misplaced annoyance at something else.
So “nostalgia” and “originality” should both just be dropped as anything but identification of a story’s genesis - plenty of “original” stuff has been completely forgettable tripe even though it’s also the genesis of all successful stories, and while it’s easy to think of “nostalgic” tripe, it’s also easy to find exceptionally good nostalgic stuff that elevated its premise and mythos… and as humanity, we’ve been doing this for thousands of years. Hell, I’d argue that the legend of King Arthur alone had been rebooted and remade about 100 times before mass media was even available, and that’s a comparatively young mythos compared to regular mythology and folklore.
…And kind of tied to that… complaining about JJ Abrams’s stuff for being nostalgic remakes or reboots is misguided, and strictly a pretentious argument with no real basis in reality, actually. He *has* made bad movies, and he *has* bad habits as a storyteller, don’t get me wrong - but they’re not based on his desire to use nostalgia as his starting point. He’s in the same class as Nicholas Meyer and Leonard Nimoy as a Star Trek movie director - they’re all guys who managed to direct two good Star Trek films, and I have to say that Star Trek Into Darkness is still better than most of the other films, even if it’s still pretty dumb in some areas. Similarly, he made the only watchable Star Wars Sequel Trilogy movie in The Force Awakens, and while, like with Star Trek, some of his mystery box-crazy philosophies and shortcuts caused problems with The Rise of Skywalker, that film’s failures have more to do with The Last Jedi being cancerously bad for a multi-part story.
Abrams should be criticized for his desire to take shortcuts and leave stuff unfinished, but frankly, more directors would be better served if they had some of his ability to identify what people liked about past artwork. He may be over-reliant on it, but it’s still an asset, not a liability.