Sunday, January 8, 2012

Quick Review of Super 8

An effort to mash together E.T., The Goonies, Cloverfield with a 70’s aesthetic that consistently fails to become more than the sum of its parts.

SPOILERS
I really wanted to like this movie but ideas are introduced then discarded until Abrams boils it down to remaking Cloverfield with an ET ending. No one cared enough about Cloverfield to see it again, JJ, let it go.

The kids are at best, utterly lacking in personality (except Firecracker kid, who gives more personality than the other five combined) and at worst, irritating as hell (Actor kid). When the film realizes this it starts dumping them out of the plot real fast (one goes and you won’t even notice until later) and concentrates on the puppy love between the girl and the main character; which any twelve year old boy will tell you, is BORING.

There is absolutely NO reason this movie could not have been set in modern day except that someone really liked the title Super 8. When it does try to press the 70s feel, the juxtaposition with the modern CG monster is jarring.

Who do you think would win in a contest between a pickup truck and a top-secret military train? The train crash is where the movie lost it for me; it goes on so long and goes so absurdly big that it begins to feel like a Monty Python sketch.

Final Queries:
This thing and presumably its species is capable of interseller travel, really? Is it smart to build your space ship out of lego(I know that once I break down a model it is almost impossible to find all the pieces later)? Was it smart of the military to keep the monster and the cubes on the same train? If the monster’s ship is made of the lego cubes, why was it stealing metal, and If it needed metal, why was it only stealing motors and electronics? And finally … the monster forms a magic daikaijū psychic bond with the people it touches … then eats them?

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