This was one of those movies where soon into the viewing, I became analytical.
A quick summary: The film begins with the death of a parent. Joel's mother dies in a work accident. His father is the police chief of the town and apparently has always been too preoccupied with his work to parent his son. Joel has a group of friends who make Super 8 films. One night, while making the film, a train crashes, and everything changes.
I worried about the film from the beginning. It seemed they were setting up Big Ideas for big emotional moments, but they never gave us any scenes, any details for me that would make me care about these characters. We learned very little about the mother. We knew very little about the father. I wanted to care about these characters. I am a big Coach Taylor fan. I wanted to see Kyle Chandler in another role, and I was predisposed to liking him. But as the father, they gave him remarkably little to do that hadn't been done by other actors in more well written scripts many times before. Kyle Chandler brought his patented intensity, his A game, but there was very little given to explain his character.
When the train crash happened, I lost hope in the movie. Here was the attention and care to details that I wanted, and they devoted it to special effects, which were spectacular, but they also made me wonder if it would actually happen that way. When I asked Mike, he said what they showed on screen violated all laws of physics.
This movie reminded me very much of Cowboys v. Aliens. Cowboys v. Aliens started off as a great western and the morphed into an action/alien picture where the script was thin and I just wanted to return back to the beginning. Super 8 was a paint by number film all the way through. There were tributes to Spielberg. There was an extended tip of the hat to Stand by Me, a film that developed characters and understood that children's lives were actioned packed and tragic without the aid of special effects and aliens.
At the end of the film, while the credits roll, they showed the movie that the kids had made. It was charming and fascinating.
"That's it," I told Mike. "That's the movie I wanted to see."
I wish that they could trust that we would want to see these kinds of films.
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