Super 8 (2011)

I know what Steven Spielberg and J J Abrams are trying to do here. They know that the last two generations pretty much grew up on the adventure movies of the 80s and everyone still loves them and thinks of them fondly. Super 8 is an attempt to harness that nostalgia into a 2011 blockbuster that will make people say, "Hey, that was pretty good! It was just like such and such I used to watch all the time." In a way, that is the biggest strength of Super 8. For the first forty minutes or so, even I found myself really enjoying the faux-1979, Spielbergian style because it really is a great style. The movie's biggest weakness is also that its sole purpose is to be like a style rather than being its own creature.

The movie starts out with this group of kids, who are surprisingly good child actors who could have been as popular as the Goonies, as they are making a low-budget horror movie for a contest. One scene they are shooting is at a train station and a train passes and also de-rails in a spectacular sequence. Something was on the train that is now loose and weird things start happening. By the time the alien, because we all knew it was an alien, starts getting good screentime the movie switches from feeling like Spielberg to feeling like Abrams. This is not a good thing. He has a tendency towards bigness that goes for not only the size of the action, but also the phony emotional tugs that do not feel genuine in any way. There's a scene where one of the kids explains that the main character in their movie has to have a wife so that when he dies the audience feels worse about it. The relationship between the main kid and his dad and then later a girl he likes feels sort of like that. It is as if the crew doesn't really care about the kids, there just needs to be something to make the audience think it must be good because there's, like, crying and stuff. You can practically hear Abrams shouting, "Production value!" just like the kid in the movie.

Super 8 is an interesting concept and a very enjoyable movie to watch. It just doesn't pack any real oomph. The closer it gets to the end, the more tiresome it gets, mostly because there's nothing in this movie that hasn't already been done, especially when compared to Abrams' own Cloverfield. The first half is pretty cool and I felt it was well done. If the whole movie had been that way, instead of becoming a silly bunch of pseudo-horror filler, I would have been much more enthusiastic about it. As it is, there's nothing really wrong with it as far as it being entertaining and certainly watchable. It isn't anything special, that's all, though it easily could have been. Even though it doesn't meet its full potential, I would still say it is worth a look.

7/10