The rest of it was mostly crap. Did George Lucas even see the first two films?
Anyway, J.J. Abrams treatment of Star Trek has been respectful without being slavish, and it hasn't really been filled with PC junk; typically he and his writers are interested in a good story more than a political line (although, Person of Interest was unfortunately in weird territory from time-to-time in Season II.)
We'll see. One out of three original Star Wars movies were good. The rest were awful. That's not a very high bar.
The beginning of the end: “Star Wars Holiday Special”
Incoherent, the holiday of “life day” is never explained nor actually made into anything the viewers should care about.
And..the treatment of Chewbacca’s entire family: one huge comedic insert with Art Carney to boot.
The only “good” thing that came from the SWHS was... Bona Fett.
It was his first appearance.
Riding a dinosaur in mud.
Abrams is about as overrated a director as I’ve seen in recent years. I’m not sure who he’s related to or who he has some dark secrets on that he keeps getting jobs.
The new Trek II was a mostly pointless exercise with no character development to speak of, just cheesy sitcom banter between Spock and Uhura and turgid melodrama between Kirk and Spock. The action scenes lacked logic, like when Kirk is constantly shooting at an enemy ship that neglects to turn and defend itself, and just keeps shooting in the other direction. Or when spaceships get torn apart under enemy fire and still manage to navigate through space and survive re-entry into the planet’s atmosphere.
Super 8 was a hodgepodge of rip-offs of earlier, much better films like E.T., Jurassic Park and Close Encounters. Once again it’s 2 hours of characters doing semi-random acts with little to no plotline to pull it all together and make a point with the whole exercise. And it built a story around silly elements yet forgot to add any sense of fun to it and instead acted like it was a serious sci-fi like Contact.
Mission Impossible 3 was the worst of all 4 of those films, with a dull storyline and extremely poorly directed action scenes that looked like rejected TV movie of the week stuff with no style or coherence.
Bottom line is Abrams doesn’t know how to direct movies. He started out as a TV producer and never learned how to tell a complete, coherent, satisfying story in 2 hours. He was a poor choice to direct the next trilogy. The fact that the new producers could make that bad a decision right off the bat doesn’t bode well for the whole project.
Second, most of the characters from the first series were drawn from Joseph Campbell's archetypes (see his works like The Hero with a Thousand Faces, et al.) and work with mythology. It is my understanding that Campbell and Lucas were not only friends, but also Campbell consulted on the first script/movie ideas. After he died in 1988, Lucas had no one else with the expertise to help him create iconic characters (and by the time he made the second trilogy, he had isolated himself from dispute, anyway. I just read a post mortem of the video game company "LucasArts" that Lucas owned, and it is full of complaints that Lucas was intolerant of opposing views, to the point that he fired people who would disagree with him. I hear the same thing happened to an aide who cautioned him against Jar Jar).
George Lucas may be one of the luckiest men alive. He parlayed a special effects company (because ILM really IS very good) into film history. He rode other people's stories and ideas to fame and success, and hasn't had a good one himself since then...