Middling Monster Does Not A Super Movie Make

.

Taking my time to post some thoughts has bitten me in the ass once again - amongst other places, if you go read what Nathaniel wrote on Super 8 at The Film Experience you're gonna have approximately 98.75% of my opinion summed up for you there. Or familiarize yourself with this paragraph from Roger Ebert's review:

"During the first hour of Super 8 I was elated by how good it was. It was like seeing a lost early Spielberg classic. Then something started to slip. The key relationship of Alice and her troubled father Louis (Ron Eldard) went through an arbitrary U-turn. Joe's own father seemed to sway with the requirements of the plot. The presentation of the threat was done with obscure and unconvincing special effects. We want the human stories and the danger to mesh perfectly, and they seem to slip past one another."

It should be noted that somehow even after expressing all that Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars, which seems a bit off. I had way too many problems with the final 45 minutes of the film to feel that good about the experience once the lights came up. The beats of the adventure swallowed whole the entirely lovely character beats that'd been set up - if somebody can explain to me precisely what big lesson Kyle Chandler's character learned and at what point that drove him to reevaluate his relationship towards his son I'd be much obliged. He hardly has reason to know the sort of danger his son's been in at any point. Their conciliatory hug at the end was as forced as the reappearance of the son at the end of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, if you ask me. And what of the fractured friendship between Joe and his directing friend Charles, that was so much of the film's story before Hell breaks loose? I can't even remember if they see each other again once they split up. The adventure should spin out from the complications in these relationships, and should somehow feel intertwined. Instead the monster just eats it all up. 

And as for that monster, I did not like that monster. It's an inexplicable tangle of limbs punching out of the blackness for far too long - at some point you need to lay your cards on the table, JJ, or we come to believe your holding a blank deck. Even if Spielberg kept the shark hidden from us for most of Jaws, we still knew it was a shark. We knew it'd have a couple of fins and a big ass mouth. Even once Super 8 was finished I still didn't have a good understanding of what this alien-insect-monster was supposed to be. There were too many legs and perhaps it was made out of bark? And it had a face of some sort? I don't know, and it never did anything nifty enough to make me care to figure it out. A lousy, unmemorable cap to too long a campaign of mystery. Even though I find the 2006 Korean monster movie The Host to be entirely overrated, one thing it got right was how it flung it's monster right into the daylight right at the start. JJ had how much more money to spend? And there was nothing even one tenth as thrilling as that creature's first attack.

But the kids were all terrific - Joel Courtney is a great find, and I'm nursing my Somewhere crush on Elle Fanning even worse after this. I just wish the film had seen fit to care about them in the end as much as it had made me care about them at the beginning.

.