Abrams, ridiculously talented as he may be, has perhaps wittingly stood as the poster boy for the Age of Convolution. There's a lot of reasons he's gone in this direction, but the main cause of this may be his near-worship of the now infamous Mystery Box (a theory from a presentation he made at a TED conference some years back). Now, setting aside the fact that you can highlight the complete emptiness of the concept with one good Simpsons reference (The box! The box!!!), its admittedly a great way to sell stuff. A story with a well-presented air of mystery just has this natural allure, doesn't it? It can always draw peoples curiosity
but in reality? The mystery box has no real dramatic function within actual storytelling.
Seriously. it's not an actual storytelling construct. It's about making people wonder what's going on or what something is and then just revealing it at the moment one has to. It's not inherently built around character, drama, arcs, and all the good stuff, but purposeful teasing....There's cause. There's effect. And those two things are grounded in a through-line of transparency because it stems from laser-focused objectives that guide the shifting narrative. And more importantly, theres always a point to all of it, as the endgame of any good mystery has to resonate. Which makes you realize Abrams isn't really constructing a mystery at all. Instead, we're simply asked to look at scene after scene and say "I wonder what that person is doing?!?" (Let alone wonder about those pesky things like character motivation). That's not mystery. That's not knowing what's going on. And it lasts until the inevitable point comes along where someone verbally explains just what in the hell his going on. Which all just means that Bbrams is actually mistaking the affectation of being mysterious for mystery itself, which is nothing more than the perpetual habit of mistaking story form for story function.
Perhaps its no accident that Christopher Nolan is the king of the modern blockbuster, for he seems to best understand the function of a convoluted plot. Yes, all his films take the form of interlocking, often-nonsensical puzzles, but Nolans advantage is that he can wrings the most genuine drama from that convolution by engineering his films around the puzzle itself. He then does his best to make the conflict a metaphor for a larger human theme.
) claimed that a woman was there but he was flip flopping between Anne and Marion and no one likes to listen to him anyway since he makes stuff up. 
