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.
You're quite right about Super 8, although if you're arguing that ET is in some sense "superior" I'm afraid we must agree to disagree. ET is an awful, treacly excuse for a film.
As for Star Trek: That's not where that audience is. There has not been any "character development" in Star Trek since 1967.
Unlike most "creative" people in Hollywood, Abrams "gets" science fiction, and that is rare [in fact, I'm trying very hard to think of anyone else in that category except Ridley Scott.] He will do a better job with this franchise than George Lucas.
I liked both of his Star Trek movies. Good old fashioned Saturday afternoon on a rainy day sitting in a dark room movies.