My dear friend JJ,
You had me at the first episode of Felicity. A beautiful girl who is quirky, intelligent, deep and insightful, proud and timid, and willing to take a chance by moving to the big city? Journal keeping via voice recorders? A great soundtrack? Be still my heart! (seriously, look at that picture. Felicity and I were meant to be.)
And then you did Alias. A beautiful girl who is quirky, intelligent, an English grad student, vulnerable and capable of handling an M16, AK47 and RPG? A great soundtrack? Be still my heart!
Then you moved on to Lost. You forgot about the quirky and intelligent beautiful girl and replaced her with a Hobbit. This is where my faith in you starts to crumble, JJ. If you had kept Felicity or Sydney, we might have avoided this, but here we are, aren’t we? Actually, that’s a lie, JJ…in spite of the dream women that you put on screen for me, you tell interesting stories with vivid characters except for one small matter:
You’ve never answered a single question.
Felicity? You kept us wondering about her guys for forever till the point where I, and everyone else, stopped giving a shit.
Alias? Rambaldi, who? The meaning of the number 47, what? You turned it into a series of mazes and loops that just got frustrating and we all stopped caring
Lost? I’m actually not going to get started on this.
Fuck it. The invisible monster in the series premiere? The Initiative? The Island?
Damnit, Abrams, you drag us through multiple seasons and instead of giving us solid answers, you give us more questions and more preposterous premises until either a) you drop the damn project and move on to something else or b) we just stop caring about these awesome ideas and issues and characters that you had started off with.
Sydney was incredible in the first two seasons. Lots of character development, interesting story arcs, challenging missions and a great case-study with respect to dualism and fate.
Lost’s first season was fascinating with respect to running from one’s past, the nature of self-awareness and change under regular and extraordinary circumstances.
But you got bored, JJ. Or something happened that you dropped those great themes for convoluted story-lines, and ridiculous character changes or “he died, but we were just kidding” arcs.
And that is why I refuse to watch or know or care any more about Cloverfield. You could’ve been one of the great ones, Abrams. You could’ve made characters witty, real, tortured and alive. But instead you settle with bigger and bigger questions, ridiculous story-lines and then you ask us to deal with it all without any resolution, without any direction, without any reason at all. I loved the trailer, I really did. Normal people under extraordinary circumstances all being filmed through hand-held cams. I love it. Except for the fact that I no longer have faith that you’ll give me anything in return, buddy.
So keep your hand-helds, keep your voltron theories, keep your “rambaldi also created the little ponies” theories to yourself.
We’re done.
—Berto