Passable

Rating: 6/10 (2 June 2015)

Super 8 is a pretty average film. On a technical level, it's fantastic. The set design was fantastic throughout the film; the caves underneath the town in particular looked really great. They were dingy, wet, and dark. The train station also stuck out to me as very well designed and it was clear early on the guy in charge of set design knew what he was doing. The lighting was great but there were a few scenes where it felt wrong. The lighting in the cave scene as a whole looked good but the lighting on the characters was not that great. It seemed pretty obvious that there was an artificial light source pointed at their faces constantly, seeing as how their faces managed to never leave the light at all. The cinematography, as far as I was concerned, was about as good as it could get. Some of the shots that stuck out included the scene where the kids were talking on the phone and Abrams used these really creatively framed shots from the floor that allowed the camera to capture everything in the scene on both ends without the camera moving at all, which I thought was pretty great. There was also a panning shot during a driving scene where the camera followed the car from the sidewalk, giving the viewer the feeling that they're standing there on the sidewalk themselves watching it drive by. That was really cool. All in all, well made on the technical level.
As far as characters and acting, again this movie shines. The actors are great for the most part (Elle Fanning was flat and seemed like she was bored throughout the entire movie). When characters needed to be emotional (except for Elle's) the acting and writing always supported the scene. The children's dialogue was actually incredibly well written. I didn't really expect them all to be written too well, but the dialogue was consistently great with a few rough spots here and there. They all felt like real kids and their chemistry together works well enough for me to safely say the actors were very well directed and aside from Elle Fanning, every actor did pretty well. They weren't perfect, but no movie is anyways, of course.
I also have to comment before I get to the story that the tone and setting are established incredibly well. There's only one scene in the entire movie that had tone whiplash, and that was mostly due to a necessary transition for the plot. The time of the movie was actually established without the movie telling me anything. As I watched it, I observed the music playing and all the timely posters and set pieces to guess the time period the movie was set in. I guessed late 70s-early 80s. And sure enough, the movie took place in 1979. The fact that I could guess so accurately without it being told to me is a testament to how well Abrams conveyed the time period and the universe. Again, it isn't absolutely perfect. For most of the first act it felt like Abrams was beating me over the head with it, but overall I liked it.
Now to talk about the story. I'll be blunt: it wasn't very good. Character motivations were sometimes unclear or forced due to the movie skimming over some of the plot lines in the movie, and there are some really obvious errors in conversations transferring from scene to scene that are so jarring I'm stunned Abrams didn't notice or think about them. The movie brushes over a few really overused clichés such as the overworked cop who is told by his superior to take a break (which has been done a million times by the way), and there are frequent lines that make absolutely no sense in context with what was just said. It almost seems like characters forget things that happened 2 seconds ago due to the uneven screenplay at times. I say at times because these moments aren't that frequent, but they did still bother me. What weighed heavily on the film and dragged it down more than anything though were the plethora of plot holes and errors in logic that pile up quickly. I'm not going to list them because I want this to be spoiler free, but let's just say my notes were littered with these script writing errors and leave it at that.
In conclusion, Super 8 is a great movie on a technical level. The acting is pretty good, and the dialogue is excellent. Unfortunately, the story is rather poor and is in my opinion the weakest aspect of the film. Even though I'm giving it a 6 I want to emphasize that this is a good film. It just has a lot of flaws in its narrative weighing it down.