Good movie, bad ending

Rating: 7/10 (20 August 2011)

I'm writing this about 1 hour after I got out of the theater.
I go to everything that Steven Spielberg had anything to do with, and I haven't yet been disappointed. And that didn't change with 'Super 8'. The story is set in the 1960's, five boys and a girl who are obsessed with making movies are going to shoot a scene at midnight at a train station. As they're shooting a car drives onto the tracks and collides with a passing train, causing a huge explosion. Having survived the crash they go over to the car that caused the crash and find their science teacher, severely injured, pointing a gun at them and telling them no to tell anyone, or THEY will kill them and their parents. This is where the movie takes off.
The acting in this movie is really good given they're all just kids, and the grown-ups also do a good job. It's really noticeable that SS produced this movie, it's all perfectly made. That man has a great talent and I hope we'll be able to see much, much more of his work.
Later in the movie we find out the train was an airforce train, which was carrying parts of an alien spaceship, and that the science teacher stopped the train to help the monster that hides below ground escape. The monster was locked up underground and is very angry, so when he can finally go aboveground he starts abducting random people, including the girl I talked about earlier. The boys (3 of them; one chickened out, the other has a broken leg), of course, go into the alien's lair to save her, which they manage, but then they are chased into a dead end underground tunnel passage. Joe, the main character, then bravely steps forward and convinces the alien to stop what he's doing.
And then comes the bad part. There's just a huge gap of information. How was the alien suddenly able to build a ship when for 5 years he was unable to? That and the ending is incredibly cliché. If not for the ending the movie would have gotten an 8 from me. But don't blame SS, he's just the producer. It's the director's and the writer's fault.
7/10