All Style ... No Substance

Rating: 3/10 (8 July 2011)

Well JJ you've done it again! Once again I've been sucked in by the hype of all Abrams fan boys expecting a fantastic production with a deeply insightful plot, good character development, clever direction and enough action and story to keep me enraptured from start to finish (*cough* Lost *cough*cough* all over again *cough*) and instead I got Super 8. An overly long suck fest which start off looking like a mildly interesting story and, instead, slowly ... so slowly .. meandered it's way toward a pointless, less than satisfying outcome leaving more open questions than answers.
Worse still, you've dragged Mr. Spielberg along for the ride this time, so I'm being deluged with pointless special effects while I'm watching the plot slowly, pointlessly, crash and burn it's way to no sort of conclusion.
The only way you could have made this film even more pointless and self-indulgent is if you'd got M. Night Shyamalan in as a consultant to throw in the occasional, aimless, curve ball.
For me, the most disappointing aspect to this is the film had all the right ingredients- a moody setting, a bygone era, retro value, government conspiracies and strong special effects- but when packaged up into a story where the focus seemed to be on some of the pointless "Human interest" elements (childhood crushes, lost parents), and (I may be off the mark here) seemed to go out of it's way to leave questions unanswered ... that's certainly not why I go to see a movie. If I want human interest and unanswered questions I'll stick to real life ... or watch reruns of Lost- but for entertainment, I'll look somewhere other than Super 8.