Finally got to watch Super 8, having bought it originally as a present for the folks and having had to wait for a discretely decent interval before spiriting it back to my place alongside some onions.
After about half an hour, it was pretty obvious I was watching Super Close Encounters of the Extra Terrestrial Cloverfield Kind - there were so many Spielberg identifiers in there it was hard to see where JJ Abrams could have put his own imprint on the movie. Cute child - check. Cute child who lost their mother to an unfortunate crushing incident - check. Cute child gets kidnapped by alien - check. Lashings of sentimentality - check check check check.
Finally, Abrams own DNA gets a look in. A monster that looks pretty much the same as the Cloverfield one. But for all the movie's obvious derivations, it has a lot of charm. The framing device, the kids of the cast shooting their own zombie apocalypse movie on the titular Super 8 camera, is a fantastic one and it also bears noting that the finished product you see over the end credits is better than Planet Terror by a mile.
The young cast - Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths and the tons-better-than-her-sister Elle Fanning - are great too, and the fact that the creature is given more depth than either a building crushing giant prawn, or a finger glowing be-good moralist, adds a dimension to the film other creature flicks lack.
In short, it's not amazing, but it is a highly watchable film, and I whiled away a happy sofa bound couple of hours watching it.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/08/2013
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