JJ Abrams and The Beta Genius

JJ Abrams is everything that Hollywood loves right now: a talented writer-director who wants to make movies with Roman Numerals in the title. Hot on the heels of "Mission: Impossible III" comes "Star Trek XI,"and you get the feeling that if anyone would care to pay a slight retainer fee, then Abrams has all sorts of ideas for James Bond and Superman. Abrams paid his dues in Hollywood on forgettables like "Regarding Henry" and "The Pallbearer" (back when he was known as "Jeffrey"); he was a writer for "Joy Ride," a wonderful little gem which exemplifies Abrams' ability to turn low-grade stupid shlock into darkly-comic fun; he was also a writer for "Armageddon," which is a one of the stupidest movies ever made, until you compare it to that OTHER space-rocks-crashing-to-earth-'98 movie, "Deep Impact," which was as dumb as Armageddon and slow to boot. "Armageddon" is never slow. Neither is JJ Abrams. On his TV shows, this is a virtue; in movies, a potential vice.

"Felicity" was his first foray into television - a charming little show about young people going to college in New York City. The show wasn't as attention grabbing as "Dawson's Creek," but a decade later, its the one that fans remember. Who could've guessed what was next? "Alias" took everybody by surprise - just as "CSI" was franchising and Reality TV was booming, here came a mega-sized thriller that was like every fan boy's dream of a spy show. Right from the start, "Alias" showed how well Abrams could thread the needle of smart and stupid, shallow and deep. Sydney Bristow is a hot smart chick who solves complex mysteries in elaborately kinky wardrobes (Jennifer Garner, meanwhile, was a hot chick who won a Golden Globe). The series was light-witted James Bond funny and apocalyptic world-ending serious. It recombined elements of soap opera, serial adventure, and boom-boom action - LCD genres - and churned out a show that critics could rave about.

Few people ever really watched. This was the Dark Age for ABC - "Millionare" was dried up, the one-two-three castaway-housewife-doctor punch was three years away, and "Alias" had the critics on its side. (It might be the great tragedy of JJ Abrams' existence that he spent many years making "Alias" a seminal piece of popular art, and it was never very popular) . But you cannot deny its influence. Premiering just a month before "24," "Alias" led the charge into a new age of massively-serialized long-running stories, reinvigorating broadcast TV with its kitchen-sink aesthetic. "Alias" made instant fossils of so much else on TV - it's hard to watch any drama from the 90s now (except perhaps "The X-Files") without a bit of nostalgia, embarrassment, and boredom.

Broadcast TV was dying. HBO had all the buzz with "Sopranos." Broadcast TV couldn't match cable for anything - not for sex and violence, not for budget, and only rarely for depth of storytelling (it is a far different thing to make 13 episodes every couple years than to make 24 episodes in one year - this is why British TV has always been better, and less plentiful, than American). "Alias" showed a new way. A big cast. A big story. And for god's sakes, don't slow down for anything.

Hence, "Lost." Abrams wasn't the sole creator of the show - besides Damon Lindelof and Jeffrey Lieber, credit must go to Lloyd Braun, ABC's then-Chairman. It would be wrong to paint Braun entirely as a studio suit - he also helped with "The Sopranos" - but it is a telling fact about the sort of age we live in that Abrams and Lindelof could hear a ludicrous high-concept proposition from an executive - "It's "Survivor" in real life, guys..." - and set their minds racing.

The first episode of "Lost" was incredibly costly - 14 million dollars, more than most indie films - and yet it is unimpeachably great, from the eerie opening reveal (why is this man lying in a bush? where'd that dog come from? what's all that screaming?) straight through to the still unanswered question, "Where are we?" It's striking how much was in place right from the beginning: the fleet-footed intermixing of the flashbacks (how exciting did a show that was half-flashback sound three years ago?), the able weaving of mysteries (who's that french woman on the radio?) and absurdities (polar bear?). Above all, right from the start, Abrams made it clear that things could change in a heartbeat, and that we could never suspect that we knew everything about our beloved castaways: sweet-looking Kate is a convict, puppydog Charlie is a heroin addict, hottie Shannon can speak French.

"Lost" tends to model its old-fashioned SF influences, but stylistically, its always been the zippy inheritor of the "Memento" mod - that millenial noir that turned time on its side to create a new kind of thriller. According to Hitchcock, suspense was waiting for a bomb to go off. After "Memento," suspense was learning why the bomb went off. That's the pleasure of "Lost" - many of its plot elements are hackneyed or downright cliche, but the whole presentation is jazz-pumped with nifty twists and pitch-perfect presentation. Better writers and actors are working in science-fiction than ever before - it's as if Laurence Oliver had starred in "I Married a Monster!" for Nicholas Ray.

"Lost" is not truly original the way that "Sopranos" was original, but it takes the dregs of genre and remakes it into something immeasurably grand. Everything Abrams touches is at least half-farce, because the plots are so ridiculous, but when we laugh at a megatwist on "Lost," it's not out of sarcasm, but out of madcap pleasure - unlike Gen-X, which sneered at soap operatics, we can't wait to see how much more preposterous it can get.

Abrams mostly left "Lost" during the second season to write and direct "Mission Impossible 3." This may be one of the great creative missteps of our age. You have to understand that Tom Cruise loved "Mission Impossible." He was like some latter-day Selznick, with M:I3 his "Gone With the Wind." He shepherded it through long years of pre-production, first with David Fincher, then with Joe Carnahan - young directors of considerable talent.

The "Mission Impossible" franchise is a strange one indeed. Few sequels are more dissimilar to their progenitor than was "Mission Impossible 2." The first movie was a labyrinthine series of obfuscations with that immortal hanging-upside-down-to-hack-the-CIA scene. It was bargain-basement Brian de Palma, and if it's aged well, its only because most pre-Matrix action movies seem lovably antiquated now. Whereas 2 was John Woo at his wooziest - a plot that was basically "Notorious" in slow motion, with Cary Grant's charm replaced by Tom Cruise's flowy hair.

2 is a great movie to watch when you're stoned because John Woo was smart enough to make the whole thing ridiculously simple - unlike the first one, drowning in plot contortions and computer hacks and pseudonyms, 2 keeps it so simple that anyone could follow it. Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt isn't really a character - he's a vehicle for watching Tom Cruise kick ass.

To Abrams' credit, he tried to do something different with 3. He gave Cruise a fiancé and a vengeance storyline (in a shout out to Abrams' quieter past, the bad guys kill Felicity). But 3 was an awful movie. And oddly, it was bad for many of the same reasons that Abrams' TV shows were so good. From Lost, you got the opening flash-forward and the shaky-hand close-up aesthetic; From Alias, you got the juggling act of Superman spy life and Clark Kent domesticity, and the unabashed pleasure of seeing a hot spy girl work undercover magic with her legs. And there was the same speed. God, how the movie zips everywhere: from Berlin to the Vatican to Shanghai in under an hour and a half.

But what seems vital and thrilling on the small screen quickly seemed shrill and overwrought on the big. What was missing? Well, characters, for one thing: whereas his TV works present huge casts of multilayered characters who reveal ever-twistier dark sides of their personality, 3 gives us one single traitor, a bunch of people who are unequivocally good, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who's evil to the point of rudeness. Really, there was a sense of been-there-done-that to the whole movie - the traitor is being evil For The Good Of America, which is a plot you've seen almost every week on 24. One imagines that Abrams wanted to explore the human side of Ethan Hunt, which is kind of like Michael Bay exploring the human side of "Transformers."

Still, in the middle of this mishmash of a bad movie, there's the Vatican City sequence, featuring Tom Cruise in a monk's robe and Philip Seymour Hoffman punching Philip Seymour Hoffman. It was a zesty little scene, and it showed that, if nothing else, Abrams was having a lot of fun with this thing. Times are changing. Who wouldn't want to make a threequel?

So how about an elevenquel? Or a reboot, or a remake, or whatever "Star Trek XI" is going to be. Abrams has already signed his "Lost" buddy Damon Lindelof on to co-produce. Lindelof is an avowed fan of geek arcana - comic books, SF, Stephen King. You can imagine the two of them making the ultimate Star Trek movie. Original? Maybe not. How can you tell a truly original story after four TV series, 10 films, and hundreds of books and comic books and fanfictions? Of course, that's what makes Abrams the perfect Hollywood auteur right now. Like Tarantino, he reassembles old cliches into zesty new models; unlike Tarantino, he wants to sell those models to a mass audience.

Abrams is a Beta Genius - not to say lesser (compared to an Alpha Genius), but more focused on refining existing product rather than creating a new one - he's the 2.0 model. Abrams wouldn't have made "Star Wars," but you could see him working on "The Empire Strikes Back." True, the first movie invented the world, but "Empire" showed everyone how to play in it - a funnier, faster, more exciting, more grand movie in every way. Hollywood loves the Beta Genius, because that means sequels and remakes. Peter Jackson's "King Kong" was a gigantic mash note to the first movie, at once a thousand times better and entirely unnecessary (the roar of biplanes at the end works so well because we know exactly what's going to happen). Or think of the new "Battlestar Galactica" - a remake of a horrible TV show becomes one of the most vital, topical, well-acted, ingenious creations in history.

I'm not saying that Abrams is a hack - far from it. His HBO project on cancer victims sounds like it will completely burst the mold on our expectations for him; his top-secret "Cloverfield" film could usher in a new era of corporate viral marketing; and anyone who tries to adapt Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" deserves a spot in filmmaker heaven (right next to Terry "Watchmen" Gilliam).

But one does wonder just how far the guy can go. He was indisputably important to the creation of "Lost," but the show didn't suffer from his absence - in fact, you could argue that it was in his absence that the show really started to flower, delving ever deeper into its central mythology, opening up strange new areas of Island life that still haven't been explained. Season 2 was slower than the first - one finds it hard to believe that Abrams would have spent so much time down there in the hatch. Season 3 started off even slower, with the fall-season stint in Othersville. Yet both Seasons paid off - you can sense that Lindelof and his writing partner Carlton Cuse are moving ever more toward the HBO-style, where each season comes together like a video novel, building towards a devastating finish.

Abrams' other TV projects have been beyond lame - he produced "What About Brian?" and "Six Degrees," and although he seems to have not been very involved with the shows, some blame has to go to him for giving Barry Watson work, and for wasting good actors like Campbell Scott and Hope Davis and Bridget Moynahan's legs. He may be finished with TV - his "Star Trek" may well revitalize the franchise; his "Dark Tower" could be amazing, though Abrams seems far too PG-13 for such a bleak, apocalyptic piece. Still, Abrams is only 41, and looks barely 12. He may surprise us with something new. Or he may just keep surprising us with something old.