A reliving of the classics, but somehow unsatisfying

Rating: 4/10 (2 May 2012)

This film centers around a group of kids trying to make an amateur zombie flick for a festival, while an alien monster attacks their small town abducting people and stealing equipment. To make things even more complicated, a dubious military branch sets up in the city in an effort to catch the monster.
Well, as you may notice I give it a 4/10 and I'll explain why. This film is kind of enjoyable and it remains true to its revival of old classics, however it suffers from several drawbacks. First though, let's see the good stuff.
The film is a revival of old classic films like E.T. and combines J.J. Abrams' good writing skills from Cloverfield, and series like Fringe. Spielberg does a good job of putting together the characters and they are good characters, each with their own mystery and little story to unravel as the film progresses. It has some good comedic elements. (SPOILER) The story of the alien monster is interesting, and visits subjects such as racism, inhumane animal testings, how bad treatment can turn a good person into one filled with hate and revenge (END SPOILER). The special effects and the action scenes are also well done and interesting. So far so good.
However, as I said, the film does have one major drawback which damages the overall experience. The kids although interesting, get in the way of the plot. Previews of the film try to sell the monster as the main plot, but in reality it's the kids that are the main plot. It would be fine in other films, but in this case you have a rampant and mysterious monster abducting/killing people and gathering technology, but you never really find out why except at the end of the film. Whenever the film is about to get boring, the creators throw in the monster to keep the viewer watching, but then the monster vanishes suddenly and no one in town really seems to care except the kids, who go on about it for about 2 minutes before returning to their boring plot. This is the same strategy followed in Cloverfield, however in Cloverfield this works fine, because you are seeing the characters constantly under stress from the destruction ensuing around them. Here you just see some action, followed by overstretched drama that shouldn't exist in a film like this. It seems the monster and the army/scientist plot was just put there to attract more people to the film and wasn't really expanded that much. This made me feel cheated throughout the film.
(SPOILER) Another drawback is the plot holes starting to appear towards the end of the film. Mainly, the actions of the townspeople who are still oblivious to the existence of a monster in their city despite all the weird killings and thefts that occur throughout the film (and the major presence of the army requisitioning everything and everyone) and also the really underplayed monster never really gets to show its character in the film (like it was in ET, where the film was a success because it expanded a lot on ET's character and gentle heart). We do learn how it came to Earth and why it's angry, but not much about who it really is. (END SPOILER)
My third and final quarrel with the film is the overuse of sensitive blue light filters. In every scene throughout the movie, we see lights flashing directly in the camera from the most minute source of light. There was a time when this was considered really bad directing, and I don't understand what has changed now. Spielberg tried to give the feel of amateurism in the film to reflect how the kids were also doing an amateur horror film. However, this could have been achieved with less annoying ways or with just less lights. JJ Abrams' Fringe does the same thing with lights to show the change from universe to universe, but it only happens once or twice throughout an episode. Not every friggin 2 minutes. It gets quite tiring, and made me flinch away from the screen every time it happened. I felt like I was in an epileptic's nightmare (I kid you not it can get really annoying).
I guess if you can ignore the crappy light effects, this can be a quite enjoyable movie if you are just looking for a new movie that revisits classic themes such as childhood friendship and is something to relax to with buddies. It's not anything exciting, but can be enjoyable. However don't go in expecting to see the greatest film of all time, as I heard a lot of people saying to me. It certainly isn't and it saddens me that it could have been a lot better.