Plenty of potential here, until it turns into a cookie cutter CGI adventure

Rating: 4/10 (8 August 2016)

SUPER 8 is a rather odd film. It's set in 1979 but feels very much like a modern action adventure film, and being a Hollywood blockbuster it's chock-full of CGI effects. Despite the copious use of slang from the era it's a film that feels like a masquerade, where characters play dress up but never really convince that they're from the era. This film was conceived by J. J. Abrams as a tribute to the Steven Spielberg movies he loved as a kid. In essence, this means that the film has a late '70s/1980s vibe going on, liberally borrowing from the likes of E.T., CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, THE GOONIES, and plenty more besides. It doesn't have an original bone in its body. Now, I'm a fan of those 1980s-era children's films too, so I was interested to see this, but I'm afraid to say it all falls apart.
There are good elements here and plenty of potential stemming from the characters. The characterisation is solid and the child actors acquit themselves well with the material. The stuff which has them shooting home zombie movies and the like is well portrayed. Unfortunately, once the over-riding science fiction plot line kicks in, all of the scene-building and characterisation is dropped in favour of making this a routine action-adventure vehicle with copious random action scenes and effects and not much else. The characters spend the rest of the movie reacting to CGI while preposterous effects scenes take place around them (the ridiculous train crash is one of the worst moments). There's an alien involved, which looks like your generic alien and nothing more, and an over-obvious climax supposed to evoke wonder but which instead falls flat due to familiarity. SUPER 8 ends up a soulless bore, when it could have been something special.