"Lazy" can however be (and often is) a description of the writing and not the writers.
Fine. Then the writing has to be idle, indolent, or sluggish. If it isn't, then it's improper word use.
The point is that the trope itself is unimaginative, uninteresting,
Then state it's unimaginative and uninteresting.
not doing the work it should be in the script.
No dramatic device (troupe or otherwise) can
do work on its own. It's just a piece of a whole. A link in a chain may be weak, and the chain might be unstable because of if it, but the only work it has to do is bind the link below it to the link above it. It either does this or it doesn't. If it breaks and the chain falls apart, it does this because it was weak to begin with, not because it was
lazy.
Likewise, if a troupe is unimaginative and uninteresting from the onset, then the story is DOA. A troupe can't just work hard, pull itself up by its bootstraps, and fix the story on its own.
So, no, a troupe can't be lazy. But this is all moot because it has nothing to do with what lazy writing really is.
The same is true when someone describes a piece of writing as "tired" or "uninspired." They're not describing the writer's process. They're describing the text. This should not be a very difficult point.
And here we go. Total bunk.
In artistic criticism, words like these
always reference the artist's perceived mental or physical state and how it affected the work.
A musical composition is
uninspired because it is obvious the composer's heart just wasn't in it. For whatever reason, his muse went on holiday, and he continued to aimlessly muck about with the lyric or melody. It has nothing to do with the piece itself.
Lazy writing is that which is generally simple, formulaic, often hackneyed and clearly done with little effort. It is often used to describe procedural television shows. These shows often have script templates that are literally fill in the blank. The writer has half the work done for him before he even starts. Therefore, he can flick out a few keystrokes while he sips mojitos by the pool.
Of course, before all the shenanigans, this was the definition people were trying to prescribe to Orci. The implication being he opened the TWOK script and hit Ctrl-C then opened the STiD script and hit Ctrl-P, and finished it up with a find/replace for Kirk/Spock.
That's really unfair. For one, the scenes really aren't that similar. Second, he couldn't just pigeonhole the whole thing into his story with out making changes.
Rather, as
Counterpart suggested with his examples from TUC and TWOK, he took something that had a certain association, fiddled with it until it was to his liking, and then molded it to fulfill its thematic obligation.
That took more effort than people give him credit for.
Do you really believe adapting material from elsewhere to a script is the same thing as mirroring an entire sequence beat-for-beat from another movie's script?
Except, as I just wrote, Orci did adapt his.
More importantly, however, the
mirror was the whole point!
He took a scene featuring a piece of glass, literally mirrored the scene to create a figurative mirror out of that piece of glass that acted as the focal point to his story's main theme.
That's hardly lazy.