Wonderful, nostalgic, thrilling, but weak final act

Rating: 8/10 (11 June 2011)

After seeing this film I've been overwhelmed by both Wonder and Awe, and disappointment.
And that is what this movie was. I don't even need to describe the first half of the film. It just pure 70s and 80s movie magic. Albeit a bit slow up until the train crash, which may be one of the best action scenes I've seen in a movie for YEARS, but after that it moves along just fine. The child actors are wonderful, believable, and hilarious. Deputy Lamb and the other father character are great. The only character who proves weak and annoying was the Air force colonel, or captain, or whatever he is. His character was so underdeveloped and badly written that I found that every scene that he was in was hindered by him.
The Alien attacks are mysterious and creepy, exactly what I wanted going into the movie. Another great scene is when the police (I actually enjoyed the moderately humorous group of local cops as much as I enjoyed the kids) are jotting down the locations of the scores of dogs who have fled from their homes and the dots create a perfect circle around the town. That is what movies like this should be like. That is sci-fi mystery movie wonder. Scenes like this continue to carry the film for a quite a while, and it is not until the final fourth that everything starts to go wrong.
First of all, when the train crashed at the beginning many little white cubes spilled out of crates from the rail cars, and the main character ends up with one in his room. Eventually these things come into play.
The scene that marks the beginning of this fourth part is when Deputy Lamb is in military custody. While he is being escorted to the bathroom, Lamb suddenly knocks out the soldier, steals his M-16, and before you know it he's dressed up in a us army uniform and is blowing up a truck as a distraction so he can escape the base. Now, this scene comes out of nowhere and is the first of many that feel a bit out of place. Earlier in the film he is seen being arrested by the military, but this was MUCH earlier. It's as though Abrams either forgot about it, or was ignoring it because he realized that he had written himself into a corner and finally he just used whatever excuse he could think of to get Lamb out of the base and back to town.
Soon after that the kids break into the trailer of their old teacher Mr. Woodward, the man who intentionally crashed the train, and they find plenty of film footage and evidence. They find out through old films that Woodward was in the military and that the air force was holding the alien captive. Apparently the creature is psychic and can communicate through touch. So when it lifts Woodward ten feet off the ground and promptly drops him, he immediately knows that... the alien just wants to go home on its space ship but the army won't let it. Fantastic. All of my expectations were crushed at that point in favor of the oldest alien storyline in the book. But getting past that, they see that those little white cubes can form solid metal and then dissolve into cubes again in the blink of an eye. And so when all of the cubes, including the one in the main character's room, fly toward the town water tower, it's a safe bet that that's where the ship is going to be. They also learn that the creature is subterranean, and they find the entrance to the alien's cave and discover what looks like the skeleton of a space ship being built inside. Not to mention the bodies of several towns people hanging from the ceiling. These are two things that are confusing and never make sense. One being, if the alien is building a ship out of the little white things, of which there are plenty, why is he also building this thing underground? Never explained. Also, there is a shot in this scene where the alien is holding what APPEARS to be a human leg close to his mouth, and one of the kids says, "He's eating people!" Ironically this line actually gave me hope that the movie would stay on a darker course, and the rest of the scene where the alien chucks two people to what must certainly be their deaths gave me more hope. But then, just when I was hoping for something spectacular as the children are cornered by the alien, the least spectacular thing that could possibly happen happens. The kid talks to it and it walks away. Thrilling, isn't it.
So yes, it appears that it is a nice alien now, and as stated before, all it wants to do is go home. And that is why that scene confused me. One second he's supposedly eating people and the next he's shooed off by a little boy. surrounding this scene there are some good action shots of the military blowing everything up as the kids run for their lives, but these are soon abandoned for the final, terribly anticlimactic scene. The alien climbs to the tops of the water tower, gets in its ship, and flies away.
But even then, that leaves three fourths of good,solid, summer action movie magic! So why does this one fourth seem to consume so much of what I have to say about this movie? Because everything else was fantastic, so naturally I expected a fantastic ending. And that is why I feel so disappointed right now. Out of all of the parts that they could have slipped up on, they chose the most important.