Right at home

Rating: Null/10 (20 June 2011)

Audiences will feel right at home in director J.J. Abrams' and producer Steven Spielberg's Super 8, an homage to Abrams' Cloverfield with its found footage motif and to many of Spielberg's child-like, home-driven imaginative films such as E.T.
Summer action doesn't get much better as adolescents like Elle Fanning struggle against the army, aliens, and parents who just don't get it. The cinematography is Abrams worthy, action dominant but with the camera frequently at a distance that allows full appreciation, rather than claustrophobia. The team of adolescent buddies filming a zombie movie can't be anything but Spielberg as an enterprising young filmmaker.
That team witnesses and films a horrific train accident that is not your garden variety disaster: it carries inside it strange Rubik's Cube objects and the hint of alien life that gives life to what could have been a standard teen alienation-from-parents story.
As in several of Spielberg's film, getting home, be it kids reconciling with parents or aliens trying to leave, is the central motif along with the splendor of fighting the teen age monsters within and growing up amid disaster. In Super 8, the teens' comic relief is regular and sophisticated, the interaction with parents and other authority figures just mature enough to keep respect flowing both ways.
Summer is reaching its peak, the skies are full of stars, and motion pictures will offer relief from the heat as well as, in the case of Super 8, a fun action film that will make you remember other sci-fi but acknowledge that the Abrams/Spielberg team does it all better than anyone else could do.