High concept, low yield nostalgic sci-fi

Super 8 is another high-concept low-yield movie from J.J. Abrams that is okay but really ought to be better. There's promise in its Spielbergian tale of a group of late-70s schoolkids making their own zombie movie only to stumble cross a real monster after an Air Force train crashes into the middle of one of their scenes, but despite the odd good scene it along the way never really takes hold. The look of the film is fine and the cast are good, but the film doesn't have the heart of those it is makes so much show of imitating. Like them or loathe them, Spielberg's 80s movies were a seamless mixture of his everyday memories of an awkward suburban childhood and his youthful fantasies and fears, the former giving them a genuinely personal and lived-through feel that helped create a credible enough world for their incredible tales for the joins to barely show. With Abrams you get the feeling of someone trying to recreate someone else's childhood memories, fears and fantasies, drawn not from life or personal imagination but solely from the silver screen. It's so self-consciously referencing the films that the director grew up with it never feels genuine and never finds a voice of its own (and talking of voices, some of the incidental dialogue is horribly flat while Michael Giacchino's score pilfers from John Williams, early James Horner and from John Barry's King Kong score so much you wonder why he's credited as composer rather than orchestrator at times). If you've seen Close Encounters, The Goonies, E.T., The Fog and any of the other films it `homages,' you'll get the feeling of ticking off a list. But then this is ultimately just a big budget sibling to the film within a film the kids are making: someone trying to recreate their childhood pleasures rather than offering up dreams of his own. Even the train crash that is the film's biggest setpiece manages to be simultaneously much more spectacular than the one in The Fugitive yet much less effective. It's certainly not a terrible film, but no matter how hard it tries the magic it so desperately aspires to never materialises.

As usual, DVD buyers get a raw deal extras-wise with just an audio commentary and a couple of featurettes, while Blu-ray buyers also get deleted scenes and a whopping 97-minutes worth of featurettes.