And I'm back! Sorry for the near death of the blog, been busy being a dad and then moving over to Berlin at the end on 2011. So now that we've more or less settled in the country, it's time to bring this time back to life. So without further ado, on we go to the first review of 2012.
Super 8 is the first original movie from J.J. Abrams, previously having done Mission Impossible 3 and the Star Trek reboot. Based on his own story and produced by Steven Spielberg himself, Abrams's movie tells the story of kids working on a movie in Smalltown, USA in the 70's and how everything is ruined by an alien.
Super 8 is a movie that doesn't know what it really wants to be and it's two sides make it seem rather schizophrenic at times. On the other hand, we have the story of the Joe (Joel Courtney) dealing with the lost of a parent, dreaming of Alice (Elle Fanning) and hanging out with The Other Kids. And as boring as that may sound, it's actually the part of the movie that really works. Abrams gets good performances out of the boys, but Elle Fanning's Alice is easily the best written and acted part of the movie. Movie might've actually benefited from making her character as the lead, but as this seems to be a movie about the director mostly, I can see why that didn't happen. And it's always nice to see an old favourite of mine on screen as well, Kyle Chandler, who will always be Gary Hobson from Early Edition to me.
The part that doesn't really fit with the story is the alien. Making its entrance in the loudest and pretty surely the longest train crash in the history of everything, it seems that the movie doesn't know what to do with the extra-terrestrial. Having it go around eating people and then trying to get the sympathy of the audience on the side of the alien doesn't work at all, especially once it is revealed that it can read minds by touch. For a movie that goes for that Spielberg feel of movies like E.T. and is actually produced by Spielberg, it's such an odd thing not to have the alien better fleshed out.
There's a lot to like in Super 8. It has the retro-feel of the 70's, the kids are all good, Michael Giacchino's score is, while not as memorable as Up's, great and fits the movie perfectly. It really a shame the alien side of it all fails to excite as well as it should. To paraphrase The Monks: Nice Kids, Shame About the ET. My score for Super 8: 6/10
