The script should have taken a cue from itself

Rating: 3/10 (16 June 2011)

After hearing a bunch of hype over the much-ballyhooed J. J. Abrams, I went to this movie with high hopes. I love making films myself, and thought watching a movie about how you made a film before iMovie would be fun.
But it turns out that Super 8 really has little to do with kids making films; rather, it has to do with some secret Air Force plot involving a mysterious being.
After a spectacular first act, the film devolves into a lot of malarkey involving strange sounds in the dark, angry townspeople, and military folk with suitcases full of little white cubes. The strange being is revealed, but this only creates more confusion because its origins are barely explained, and after they are, it's difficult to care about them because this plot point has nothing to do with anything else in the movie. We then see some equally confounding scenes involving a big hole in the ground and a water tower with a story arc that defies understanding. And then, before you know it, POOF!--the being is gone. But again, this was anticlimactic; since we knew so little about the whats and whys of the action, there was no reason to care about it.
Early in the film, one of the boy filmmakers tells his friend about how important caring about your characters is to your story. Well, after a while, I didn't care about these characters, mainly because the story was not there. Why things happened the way they did was never explained, and both the characters and story took a back seat to a never-ending cacophony of senseless explosions and fire in which absolutely no one ever seems to be in danger. That does not make for a good movie.