“If you talk about this, you and your parents will all die.”
Well, I guess I will have to keep this short then. The thing that is great about Super 8 is that it harkens back to that time when kids were the heroes of an adventure movie (Goonies, Monster Squad, Space Camp, E.T., etc). Something bad is going on, and all the adults are essentially powerless to stop it. Cue the rag tag group of kids to save the day.
I imagine we have all had that moment when we were younger that such a movie was inspiring. That movie where the premise dipped into the science fiction realm, yet still felt real enough that it could possibly happen. And then you find yourself wishing that was real life, and you were in that group of pint-sized heroes. To this day, I still want to be a Goonie or help the Monster Squad stop Dracula. This movie does a great job of taking you back to that feeling, and I find that refreshing.
(The following got cut off of my original post, so I had to rewrite it off the top of my head. It was a little more witty the first time, but I can’t find that anymore.)
I also like that they used the old horror movie trick of not showing you the “creature” until the end. Sometimes the unknown is far more frightening that what you know.
Will Super 8 win any awards? Probably not, but this could very well be a movie that makes you dust off your BluRay player (because who knows what the format will be by then), try to find batteries old enough to fit the remote, and watch this movie so you can remember how awesome The Goonies was all over again.
