Not So Super 8

This evening I drove with Amber to the exciting town of St Johnsbury to see the movie Super 8. I had heard it billed as a real through back to the friend-gang movies of my childhood, Goonies, Stand By Me, with the alien underpinnings of ET. So, naturally, I had very high expectations. The movie did some things right. The characters and their relationships were delightful, if somewhat underdeveloped. I loved the kid obsessed with firecrackers, and the kid from the giant family of endless siblings who is an aspiring film maker. The main character definitely had the very likable air of the Goonies Mikey or Gordie from Stand By Me. The telltale fat kid, however, and subsequent jokes about his fatness, while definitely true to the times, may have been better left in the 80s. The real fault of the movie is my main complaint about most movies these days, and the thing that absolutely made it fall short of it's decades earlier counterparts, was it lack of heart. In the last 20 minutes of the movie you are supposed to develop some deep sympathy for this poor, Earth-stranded, alien creature that they basically spent the first hour and a half of the movie terrorizing you with. It didn't really work for me after watching the thing devour what were clearly human body parts it had retrieved from it's spider-like lair underneath the city. Plus there was just too much violence and too many explosions for me to really want to feel much of anything other than a little defendsive. The truly excessive train explosion scene (I mean really, they all, and the girl's car, survived?) for example, or the scene of the military torturing that poor professor before they killed him. It was a little much.

I'll end by saying that I think the truly amazing thing about those fabulous 80s flicks was that they could totally entertain with a deeply heartfelt, interesting, and often gut bustingly script and story that didn't have to resort of excessive violence and horror. Yay for the 80s! It's nice to remember the good things that happened back then. And now, I'm off to download a copy of the original ET. "Phone home"...