Carl the Critic: Reviews "Super 8"

Experience/Expectations: This certainly is a year for alien movies, isn't it? And a few of them so far are actually pretty good. But what about "Super 8?" Let's talk about it.

Story/Critique: It's basically every Spielberg ever made from the late 70's early 80's with several themes including the test of friendship, government conspiracy's, a budding romance, and everything else. The movie circles around Joey, a teen-aged boy who's mother had recently died in a factory accident, and is making a movie with his friends about zombies. On one night when shooting a scene for the movie there is a train crash that happens and the military is trying to keep it a secret. But it's hard to do so when strange things happen such as engines in cars disappearing, dogs disappearing, the electricity is disappearing, and even people are disappearing. There are so many questions, and it's up to Joey to find answers, with a little help from his friends.

There are several movies that Spielberg either directed or produced that I can think of off the top of my head: "Jaws," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.," "Goonies," and "Alien" (which is actually not a Spielberg movie but it still came to mind). It happens to combine all of these movies into one, and for the first half of the film starts doing it very well. It certainly has a lot of great moments, and it is shot very well [thanks to cinematographer Larry Fong who also did "Sucker Punch,"] and director/writer J.J. Abrams did a fairly good job. The acting is good, and production design feels like we are in the summer of 1979.

Although the first half is good (minus the fact that there is a lot of swearing), when we get to the middle, things start to get more and more corny. By three quarters of the way through, it's almost jarring, and then by the last thirty minutes its seems like J.J. Abrams ran out of ideas and was like "I got to end this but don't know how... WWSD (What Would Spielberg Do?")?" I'm not sure if Spielberg would end the movie the same way that J.J. Abrams did, but then again who knows. At any rate, when the movie does end there are still many questions that are not answered, and it's quite clear that there was an attempt at an artistic finish that involved Joey finally accepting the death of his mother. There's not a lot I can say without giving away any of the major plot details but basically there is an alien and he... No! He doesn't phone home! But he does go home.

I wish there was more to it than this, because this is a shorter critique than normal, but really this is all you need to know. I thought that over all it was a feel good movie, if it came out in the 1980's it would be a classic, but in this day and age it's kinda cliche and corny. But I still like it and hope you all enjoy it as well.

Over All: I gave "Super 8" an 8.6 out of 10, for taking every good part of every classic movie from the 1980's and combining it into a single film.