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Huh. The first trailer was kinda, “yeah, whatever. another monster movie.” But the second trailer has this sort of E.T. meets Monster Squad vibe. Could be cool.
I couldn’t stop thinking about E.T. as I watched this trailer, so I’m glad you’re on board with that. It reminds me of all of the awesome 80s adventure movies that just aren’t made the same way any more.
What John said. The first trailer made me just shrug my shoulders. “Oh look. Cloverfield out west instead of New York…..meh”. But this looks like a welcome throwback.
Also, fwiw, I have zero recollection of typing in “sex” as a tag. Weird. I think it might be a reflex after “super” ever since my last crazy trip to Montreal.
you probably typed in a number, which it interpretted as a tag ID, which happened to be the tag ID for “sex.”
It’s a bug in an otherwise very buggy tagging system that I’d love to fix one of these days.
As this is now out and has had more hype, I’m actually less interested in seeing it mostly due to Spielberg glomming on to the whole thing. I could handle a JJ Abrams homage to Spielberg but if this actually has Spielberg’s involvement as much as he’s been shoving his mug into cameras and interviews over the past couple of weeks I have much less interest. Fuck that guy and his relentlessly cheery endings. His entire career is based on the premise that Greedo shot first.
That being said, has anyone seen it yet?
I dunno, man, it’s being compared to Goonies and Stand By Me. That makes me very interested, and would even more so if I had kids Emma and Dylan’s age.
i’m waiting till its showing at the drive in. this seems like the perfect drive in movie.
Yeah, I mean if it’s more those movies then that’s fine. That’s what I initially thought and that’s why I found it interesting. But now that pretty much every mention of this movie has to mention Spielberg, it’s starting to annoy me and I’m starting to not care.
I saw it. It was a mess. A “Losty”, J.J. Abrams-ish mess. One of the things that bothered me so much about Lost was that it tried to be influenced by lots of awesome things, but what it ended up doing was just half-assedly referencing them in relatively pointless ways.
That’s exactly what Super 8 did. It felt like E.T. meets The Goonies meets Jaws but it tried to live off of the loose connections it made to those classics instead of paying homage to them in a meaningful way while doing something new and exciting.
In spite of all of that, it was still pretty entertaining and there were several good performances, but overall I am pretty disappointed. Meh.
I’m just going to go ahead and say I loved this movie. I walked into Super 8 expecting a pure shit-bomb and was happily denied it.
I loved that they used a bunch of unknown kids who were just enjoyable to watch. There were a few times I jumped in surprise, a few times I welled up, a few times I heartily laughed, and I walked away with a warm, fuzzy feeling akin to what—I imagine—most people felt when they saw E.T. for the first time [I saw it for the first time 2 years ago, but spare me the public flogging].
Super 8 is two movies grafted awkwardly together. One of those movies is great, but it gets awkwardly superseded by the pointless and irritating second one… and then entombed in an avalanche of empty homages and lens flares.
Spoilers below, obviously.
There’s the kernel of a beautiful movie in here and it gets dropped right into your lap from the start. Here are kids making a movie. Realistic, well-acted, well-written adolescent characters, not adults in tiny bodies saying adult things. There’s a sweet innocence and gentle drama in watching this thing play out… watching the act of creation slowly draw these kids out of their shells and allow them to feel vulnerable. I admired how the adults were mostly seen from a distance, how the camera gamely captured everything from the shorter height of a young gaze (a very Spielberg trick). I would have gratefully watched two hours of this movie, and loved it.
Then, around 45 minutes in, an alien monster gets awkwardly crammed into the proceedings and carries off the movie like a piece of toilet paper on his shoe. The monster hangs around the periphery, unseen, and does some stuff. He scares some dogs, steals some appliances, knocks a few heavy things around. Then he glances at the protagonist for a moment, finishes building his spaceship, and leaves. That’s it.
There’s a smattering of homages to 80’s flicks, but Abrams can’t seem to figure out how to blend Spielberg’s pop-confection of suburban melancholy and quirky menace. The works separate like oil and water. I blame this on the lack of stakes, a poor narrative thrust. In Spielberg’s ET, the little alien would have never gotten home (and probably would have died) if Elliot hadn’t managed to rise to the occasion. In Donner’s Goonies, the kids save their homes and defeat the bad guys (hardened crooks, at that). If the kids in Super 8 had stayed inside and never gotten involved, everything would have ended exactly the same way. All character arcs were already in motion before the beast stormed into the story. And it seemed to escape, evade authorities, build a ship, and get itself back home without any assistance from any character whatsoever.
It’s an average movie, but it could have been something great.
Also, the lens flares. Seriously, JJ Abrams, the lens flares. It’s getting to the point where they take up half the frame for 30 seconds at a time, like I’m watching the movie on a cracked LCD screen. It’s like they set up production in Fringe’s “Over There.”
See, from what I’m reading now that people have actually seen this it’s exactly what I thought was going to happen. Like everything Spielberg gets his stupid bearded mitts on, it’s all about the advanced sell of some “homage” or deeper significance almost as a buffer to people who might think the movie just is not very good. “Oh, this movie is an homage to my father who fought in the war. Don’t like it? Why do you hate our veterans”….."Oh this is an homage to my jewish roots. “Don’t like it? What are you an anti-semite”…“Oh this is an homage to the wonder of childhood……Think it stinks? Why do you hate innocence and childhood?” I don’t know, maybe it Abrams made this movie just on his own it might be a little better than what I’m reading it is. But like everything Spielberg it becomes all about him and it sounds like rather than just focusing on making a good movie the whole thing just falls apart under the weight of it’s own pretensions and wants to coast on good will.
I’ll probably see it when it comes out on dvd, and maybe once the hoopla has calmed down I’ll actualy enjoy it. I’m sure it’s not horrible. I just hate what an annoying twit Spielberg has become over the past 15 or so years. Seriously, dude. Just shut up and make more movies like Jaws and Indiana Jones that have some form of edge to them.
Justin, as usual, stated my opinion much more eloquently than I did.
Kevin, I honestly think Abrams is more to blame here than Spielberg. I’m not really clear on how involved Spielberg was in the making of this film, but it all comes across to me as a failed attempt by Abrams to please Spielberg. I suppose it’s naive to think that Spielberg didn’t have a say in the movie’s development given the fact that it is so openly associated with him, though.