Setting was well captured, the rest...hmmm!

Rating: 6/10 (24 November 2011)

Saw Super 8 a couple of days ago and was really looking forward to it. But, I wasn't really happy with the end result. Although the setting of the movie, the late 1970s, is well captured and the tension build up until the train crash incident is pretty exciting...when the monster's on the loose, it gets kinda boring. The alien monster wasn't interesting at all. I thought it looked too weird to be such an intelligent lifeform. Furthermore, I hated that the monster was almost always present in a very dark setting. We didn't really get a good look at it. Why's that?! Mean...when Jurassic Park came out, most of the dinosaurs were CG-animated in a dark setting, but that was because CG technology wasn't as far as it is now (they did this by way of masking the CG flaws...although I didn't really see they were bad). I know they said in the movie Super 8 that the monster liked to live underground, but that's a bit of a weak excuse not to show the monster in broad daylight. But they did, probably also because it's more scary when a monster only appears in the dark. Well, that's more or less true, but there are also a lot of examples as to when a monster is also scary at broad daylight (see for instance Jaws). Anyways, my conclusion is that this movie could have been so much more!