7.3 stars (as of this date)? Really?

Rating: 4/10 (28 November 2011)

"Super-8" isn't an awful movie, and I will freely admit that the child actors do a much better job than most, but how could this be rated as high as it is? To me (and to use an old aphorism), there's no there there. This film doesn't really have anything to say, other than that the producer and director liked to make films when they were younger. This would have been a MUCH better film if it had omitted the SF/alien angle completely.
As it stands, it is an uneasy melding of "E.T.", "Cloverfield", "Stand By Me", and "The Goonies." Furthermore, it contributes nothing that we haven't already seen many times before. I know it's up to the producer to decide what the money gets spent on and which films get made, but this was a terrible miss by anybody's standards.
Finally, I have to mention the CGI and FX, which are uniformly dull. This worked for Abrams in another film when the action took place in space, but the same thing doesn't work for Small-town, USA. The train crash, for example, is excruciatingly long and unrealistic, and the viewer begins to wince after the first five seconds or so because it is just so embarrassing. (As usual, I blame gamers for this, as they seem willing to accept the most mediocre CGI as long as it looks about what their games look like.) It's not thrilling and certainly not realistic.
But I drone on. This is an adequate movie, but it's not a good one.