Set in 1979, two movies in one.

Rating: Null/10 (27 December 2011)

The subject of this movie is dear to my own heart, making Super 8 home movies. I had my own Super 8 camera in the 1970s and did a bit of filming. However most of our real movies, with acting and dialog, were made in the early 1980s with an early portable camera and VHS recorder.
JJ Abrams wrote and directed, and much of the inspiration came from his own youth. The core story are a bunch of "little rascals", 12-ish boys and girl making a movie, complete with costumes and makeup, filmed with a Super 8 camera and sound recorded to later splice in.
One night while filming at a train station they happen to witness a train crash, a horrific mess with cars thrown everywhere. They observe hundreds of silver knobby cubes strewn about. One of the boys brings one home with him. They manage to leave right as the military are responding to the situation.
Several days later when they got their movie film developed, they found an inadvertent recording of a very strange creature escaping from one of the cars. That represents the other movie within the movie.
The critic Ebert has a good complete review. Much like he did, I found myself much more taken with the story of the kids making the movie than I did with the strange creature and its affect on the community. Not all of the happenings, especially in the second half, came together to make a coherent story. Still, we enjoyed it.
As the end credits roll in the right half of the screen, the home-made movie that the kids shot is rolling in the left half. That was actually the most fun to watch.
SPOILERS: Back in the 1950s or 1960s some sort of fast, ugly, and powerful alien was captured and the strange silver knobby cubes somehow fit together to form its space ship. The US government had been keeping it captive while studying the cubes, and that night of the train wreck it escaped from one of the cars. That was what the kids captured on their Super 8 film. It was now trying to assimilate something to "go home" and in the end it does.