SUPER 8

JJ Abrams put a bunch of Spielberg movies in a blender and when they were all chopped up and mixed together into a soup he tried a taste and said to himself, 'not bad.'  I'd have to agree.  In short, the Goonies are in Close Encounters but the alien is Jaws until the very end when he is ET.

A bunch of kids in 1979 are filming a movie at a train station when they see a pickup truck derail a train.  You might think that a pickup truck would not derail a train.  You are correct.  It would spectacularly derail it, with a gigantic fireball that sends train cars flying into the air like bottle rockets.  Considering the driver of the truck ends up living, I basically have no fucking clue how any of what I just said happened.  All the kids are fine and the secret alien inside the train is fine.  I guess all the workers on the train died but you can't see 'em so whatever.  The movie wanted to treat us to a gigantic explosive set piece and didn't want to waste our time figuring out what could make it happen.

The kids are believable as a group of friends but they are always splitting up and focusing too much time on Main Kid.  They work better as a group and the Main Kid's story is...  Well, combining aliens with stop-missing-dead-people stories seemed a little weird to me in SIGNS way back when, and its a little weird here too.  The humans pull all the weight here, and the alien slacks off.  He should be doing the heavy lifting considering he looks a bit like Goro from Mortal Kombat if he walked around on all sixes.

The alien eats people, but sometimes he just kidnaps them so he can eat them later or let them escape and then chase them and eat them or stop and listen to them talk and then not eat them.  I couldn't figure out why the alien did what he did.  When he leaves spoiler, I didn't know why he just didn't leave earlier.  I think he was waiting to eat a few more people.  Was he taking Vincent D'Nofrio's advice from MEN IN BLACK and having a snack before the long trip?  I like that the alien eats people.  Later they try to play up that he's a misunderstood monster, but he's also really smart and psychic, so I think he knows what he's doing when he eats people:  he's eating them!

There's some 'I miss my dead mom a whole lotta bunch', there's some 'keep yer kid 'way from my kid!' and some 'ha ha pot was funnier back when you could get a life sentence for it' thrown in.  The most overt reference to the Spiel-verse?  Probably Glynn Turman, the science teacher from Gremlins who turns up as (wait for it, hold your breath) a science teacher, who invents some sort of magic pickup truck that is never really explained.

If you've never heard of Spielberg you will probably like this.  If you like his movies you will probably like this.  But if you love his movies, your appreciation might decrease.  Still, its nice to know that someone else can handle the genre, even if they shit a little bit on it with CGI lens flare.