No sense of awe and wonder

Rating: 4/10 (12 March 2012)

Super 8 cites a lot of movies, mainly every Spielberg movie from the late 70s and 80s, and the Goonies. But unlike in those movies, the kids in Super 8 seem strangely nonchalant about events around them that are supposed to be marvelous and exciting.
Remember the kids in E.T.? They were concerned about the alien every single second. The guy in Close Encounters? He got so obsessed that he formed plateaus from mashed potatoes. His normal daily life ceased to exist. All those characters got so involved with the events around them that their everyday lives didn't matter anymore.
But the kids in Super 8? They survived a train disaster which had things exploding and wagons flying for minutes, they got told that they would likely get killed for having seen something that they shouldn't, their town got occupied by military while people and dogs keep disappearing. Yet, none of that seems to impress them. They are too busy making an amateur horror movie, falling in love with another, and having trouble with dad. There is a scene where the kids watch a strange cube they found at the train wreck developing a life of its own and punching a hole in the house wall. In another scene, a kid sees disturbing things at a cemetery. Do they care? Not enough to even mention these events in the scenes following. And even the main idea of the plot, that the kids accidentally filmed something secret, goes nowhere. The film's content is revealed so late that it doesn't matter anymore.
How is the viewer supposed to grow a sense of awe and wonder about the miraculous events if even the characters are more concerned with their amateur movie or their troubles with dad or with any other randomly tossed-in subplot? Super 8 completely lacks the sense of awe and wonder of the movies it attempts to be a homage of.
It took Elliot the length of an entire movie to grow a relationship with ET. Super 8 goes the express way, thanks to instant empathy. Near the end, the alien just touches the boy, they totally understand another within a second, the boy tells the alien something along the lines of "time heals all wounds", the alien flies off, and everything is sweet and happy. So sweet that everyone has forgotten the alien's killing spree of some minutes ago as well as its habit of storing people and eating them alive (though the movie is vague about this). Bad things happen, and time heals all wounds, after all... The boy seems so eager to forget the "bad things" that he pretentiously lets the medallion of his dead mother go and become part of the spaceship. Basically, we're told that remembering your dead mum is a bad habit that you better get rid of so you can dedicate yourself to fun things.
I think the movie would have been ten times better if it skipped all those random, pretentious, fake emotional subplots about mums and dads and falling in love and concentrated more on its entertaining bits: the effects and the funny amateur horror movie subplot.