Another person has come forward to talk about the shortcomings of Star Trek into Darkness, this time J.J. Abrams.
His comments come after the recent ones from Damon Lindelof regarding the secrecy around Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Khan character.
Abrams admitted that there were unresolved issues even when Into Darkness began filming. “I take full responsibility for this — I was encouraging the writers in certain directions, and we were working on the script and putting it together,” he said. “But by the time we started shooting, and this was literally at the very beginning of the shoot, there were certain things I was unsure of.
“Any movie, any story has a fundamental conversation happening during it. There’s a fundamental argument; there’s a central question. And I didn’t have it.”
“I felt like, in a weird way, it was a little bit of a collection of scenes that were written by my friends — brilliantly talented writers — who I somehow misled in trying to do certain things. And yet, I found myself frustrated by my choices, and unable to hang my hat on an undeniable thread of the main story. So then I found myself on that movie basically tap-dancing as well as I could to try and make the sequences as entertaining as possible.
“Thank god I had the cast that we have, who are so unbelievably fun to watch. And an incredible new villain in Benedict Cumberbatch…I would never say that I don’t think that the movie ended up working. But I feel like it didn’t work as well as it could have had I made some better decisions before we started shooting.”
Speaking of Khan, Abrams agrees that keeping his identity a secret might have been a mistake. “At the end of the day…[while] withholding the Khan thing ended up seeming like we were lying to people, I was trying to preserve the fun for the audience, and not just tell them something that the characters don’t learn for forty-five minutes into the movie, so the audience wouldn’t be so ahead of it,” he said.
Source: io9
