Spoilereview - Super 8

I don't like Super 8.

The movie isn't all bad, I actually enjoyed large parts of it, but the bad parts just ruin it. Elle Fanning is amazing as Alice, and the other child actors, while not as good as Fanning, are wonderful. I also love the first half of the film, outside of a few problems in the realism department. The early plot of the kids working on their movie while all the oddities around town are happening is a lot of fun.

The first big problem with the movie happens fairly quickly in the train crash. That train crash scene goes for several minutes too long and is one of the must ridiculously over-the-top scenes I've seen in a while. Everything explodes, the train is apparently going fast enough to completely derail and snake around everywhere, somehow blowing up a building in the process. Somehow—amidst all this chaos and destruction—the protagonists and their car are unscathed, despite the aforementioned explosion and the schrapnel flying everywhere. 

This same problem comes up later when the kids are heading back to town and the military has tanks going through the town, shooting things. There are far too many explosions and close calls in a scene that could have easily been cut shorter and made less ridiculous. Most scenes with the alien also take things a few minutes too long. If J.J. Abrams had someone looking over his shoulder the whole time to ask him if they really needed that 18th explostion or the 10th minute of that action scene, it might have been better. Instead, Super 8 has a running problem of overdoing things.

The CG Alien monster presents its own problems. It seems to just randomly attack people for much of the movie in scenes that feel overdone. It tries too hard to be a mixture of Jaws and Jurassic Park every time someone is about to get attacked. 

We find out that the Alien is just scared and wants to leave, it's not really supposed to be the enemy. Which is why, I suppose, it kills all those random people for no reason. We find out this information from a video the kids find that was made and narrated by their ex-military teacher. There is no reason for him to have narrated this video, outside of some never realized plan to send it to the media. Also he keeps it in a storage unit on school property. The military somehow never found out about this storage unit when searching for his files in his home and school, despite the infamy of his storage unit among the students. 

The alien has no development at all, and its backstory is very hastily thrown in. It's very generic, uninteresting, and barely relevant to the plot. It just eats people because that's what it does, but it's not really bad. When the kids go down to its lair, random equipment and people hang suspended from the ceiling, and the kids decide to rescue Alice and two other people while leave the others.  After the alien kills the other two while chasing the group down, it decides to pick up Joe—because he looks friendly I suppose—instead of killing him. Joe then says that even though bad things happen, you can still live, causing the monster to randomly put him down and be kinder, gentler alien.

This happens about 7 minutes from the end and is the most pathetic climactic point of a movie I've seen outside of movies I watch because they're bad. Joe gives a 30 second speech and the alien lets them go because he never thought about it that way I guess. Then they are outside and the alien flips a switch, causing a bunch of metal to gather at his base, forming his space ship that he leaves in, with the final piece being Joe's mom's locket. The end.

Had the alien been a remotely established character, that would have been a good scene. Instead, it's just weird and out of place as Super 8 seems to want us to think that the alien and Joe are so alike. Despite the fact that they don't actually have anything in common. The alien was abused, Joe's mom died in a work accident. Alice and the alien have more in common than anyone else due to the verbal abuse from her dad. Maybe if the movie had shown her and the alien coming to an understanding because they both have had bad things happen to them, the attempts at parallelism would have worked. The movie also seems to think Joe and his dad had this big coming together at the end, despite the fact that the dad has done everything so far for the town, not his son, showing how distant he still is from him. 

The final act of Super 8 as a whole feels dull and disjointed. The alien isn't developed enough to be interesting and its sudden change of heart is cringe worthy. The science fiction elements took over too much and instead of being a backdrop to the kids, it rendered them irrelevant to the plot. If the kids had sat around doing nothing, it would have ended exactly the same way plus Alice would be dead, because they affected nothing outside of saving Alice, which was a fluke anyway and she might not have died even if they didn't come. Alice's capture was bad writing anyway since the alien walked into the middle of town kidnapped one person and got away without being seen by all but her father.

The alien was going to leave earth anyway, so Joe's cringe-inducing speech didn't really do anything except save his own life. In the end, the kids just get shoved to the side as they go around doing nothing of value. Joe's dad doesn't actually do anything either, he just escapes from the military and shows up at the end. None of the characters affect anything. 

Super 8 is two plots: kids coming of age while making a movie and an alien monster attacking the city while actually being a nice guy who just wants to go home. These two plots are never properly connected and the movie could have actually been good if the alien had less play or an actual connection to the characters, like Alice. Instead we never see Alice between her kidnapping and rescue and we never see a reason to care about the monster.

Super 8 is a few good things thrown in with a lot of bad. The kids working on their movie was a lot of fun, especially when they just weren't noticing all the crazy stuff happening in their real life. It just lost that as it went on, and, in the end, their zombie movie playing over the credits was more entertaining than the entire third act and much of the second.