3. JJ Abrams Regrets Star Trek Into Darkness Secrecy
Warning: This post contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek Into Darkness! If you haven't seen the film, continue on to the next page. You have been warned.JJ Abrams is famous for his penchant for secrecy, which he sums up as his "mystery box" approach to filmmaking. Though we can certainly appreciate his desire to not have plot details and twists ruined before audiences have a chance to see a film, he did go a bit overboard in regards to his latest film, Star Trek Into Darkness. In the months leading up to the film's release, Abrams kept almost annoyingly tight-lipped about the identity of the film's villain, though fanboys everywhere saw through the smokescreen pretty clearly. Sure enough, "John Harrison" was revealed to be the famous villain Khan, a twist that felt a bit obvious to anyone who had closely followed the film's production. Despite Abrams' attempts to keep Khan's identity a secret, it was almost as if he was trying
too hard, something he would only have done if it was in fact Khan. Whether or not that secrecy ended up hurting or helping the film is another story, but now Abrams himself has spoken up about how it was handled in a recent interview with MTV:
"The truth is because it was so important to the studio that we not angle this thing for existing fans. If we said it was Khan, it would feel like you've really got to know what 'Star Trek' is about to see this movie. That would have been limiting. I can understand their argument to try to keep that quiet, but I do wonder if it would have seemed a little bit less like an attempt at deception if we had just come out with it."
It's easy to see where he went wrong, and why he made the choices he did. On one hand, you don't want to alienate audiences who aren't familiar with the Trek mythos, while on the other trying to preserve any spoilery plot details from ruining the initial moviegoing experience. Now we'll just have to see if Abrams lightens up a bit when it comes to his next film, a small flick called Star Wars Episode VII.