ET meets The Goonies in Cloverfield

Rating: Null/10 (10 August 2011)

A film that you will have seen before - too often. The title says it all. Yelling noisy kids making a home movie on super 8 (cue uninteresting nostalgia for 1979!) and film a train crash (cue CGI splatter of metal which you know will never hurt anyone on scr4een!). There is a secret lurking inside the train wreck (cue easy guess it is some sort of creature!) and gradually the town is gripped with fifties-style paranoia, the kids (single parents of course!) get closer despite parental disapproval, the military are psychotic lunatics, and who but a couple of teenagers can save the world! Early on you know it is an alien, who turns out to have been tortured,(cue JJ Abrams long armed octopus!) and he just wants to get home - sic! Parents bond with kids, alien bonds with kid, and lo and behold, the ending has a strange alien spacecraft ascending to the heavens while 2011 motif of kid letting go of his dead mother's locket (cue no tears but groans aplenty). Manipulative, cardboard emotions, totally lacking in suspense (except for the possibility that the kid hero and heroine might be Luke and Leiea siblings!), and fairly thin. The praise must be down to how awful Captain America, Green Lantern etc are!!!!!?