Super 8

Review by Jason Donner

There's something about Super 8 that takes me back to the days of old movies like ET or The Goonies and I'm sure that's not an accident.  Set in the 1970's, sitting down to watch this movie is like sitting in a time machine back to simpler days... if those simpler days involved bloodthirsty aliens and gonzo military goons.

Super 8 involves a group of small-town kids who are making a zombie movie for a film festival.  One of them recently lost his mother in an industrial accident and is kind of drifting through life with a detached father who isn't sure how to be there for him at all.

One night, while filming a scene at a train station, the kids happen to be there when an air force train crashes and something escapes from it into the night.  Soon, this monster is terrorizing the town and the kids are on a mission to figure out what's going on before the air force steamrolls their sleepy city to recapture the creature.

Super 8 is some pretty good filmmaking.  From beginning to end, you can tell that it's a leaner movie free of the trappings of today's commercialism and product placement.  Instead, we're treated to a film full of genuine emotions and wonder.

Aside from some pacing problems that chunk the movie up a little too much, Super 8 is a movie that relishes its own innocence and nostalgia while wisely mixing in the things that are new and exciting.

This is such a fun waltz down memory lane!  It's like watching old Spielberg movies for the first time.  Of course, all of the good natured nostalgia would be worth jack without a good script and the cast to pull it off and Super 8 has both.

The cast of kids in this movie are great.  So genuine and real, a relative cast of unknowns has successfully outclassed and outmatched their demographically chosen Disney Channel counterparts in every conceivable way.  It's hard to imagine this movie being as successful without them.

The script, which celebrates the sci-fi trappings of long ago, ironically carries the message of letting go to that which causes you pain and it does it in some very clever ways.  Even the end scene, which I won't spoil for you, plays that message to the end and never makes it obvious.  Let's just say that everyone in this movie needs to let things go.

I loved Super 8 and, even though the pacing was a bit blocky, this is such a wonderful Summer blockbuster -- the type of blockbuster I used to enjoy when I was a kid.  It was such a wonderful feeling to relive that time of my life all over again.

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