Super 8 (Sunday June 12, 2011) (44)

Super 8 is J.J. Abrams' ode to Spielberg movies of the 1970s and 1980s, E.T. most specifically. Unlike those film though, this movie has no charisma from its actors or alien. It has a bunch of explosions and nothing exciting or interesting. It's a weird stealth blockbuster, where the moment you leave the theater, you forget what you just saw.

The title of the film comes from the fact that it is set in 1979 in some small Ohio town where there are a group of kids who are making a zombie movie on a Super 8 camera. The main kid, Joe (Joel Courtney) is the son of the deputy sheriff and he's sad because his mother just died (this background is really just noise, because it has nothing to do with the story). The female star of the movie is Alice (Elle Fanning), the school hottie who Joe has a thing for.

When they're shooting a scene outside, they see a big train crash (which goes on for a Passion-like 10 minutes... like, enough already. We get it. It's loud and explosive). Then there's an alien who goes loose in their town banging into things and stealing people, and then the Air Force comes in and locks down the area. Joe and his friends decided they're gonna find the alien (that the Air Force can't find). I'm already asleep. Wake me when we get to the teary alien farewell.

The major problem here is that we never really know what the hell the alien is and why we should care about it (hint: it's got eight legs... get it!?!). It is more than raising the curiosity or tension - it's just frustrating. All we see is that people are snatched up by a weird tentacle/arm thing (see: the first episode of Lost where the pilot is taken out of the plane by Smokey) and a bunch of stuff is blown up and pushed around. I think it's not until the end of the second act that we get a sense of what the thing looks like, and then it's moving around the whole time (it seems to have the vagina dentata face typical of post-Alien, post-Predator monsters). What's worse, we get the whole story told to us in an audio cassette near the end. So at that point we should all just pack our things and go home.

Worst of all is that Joel Courtney has absolutely no screen appeal and is totally forgettable. I guess it's hard to cast kids, but this one is a dud. Fanning is fine. There is almost no meat in her role, but the does well in the one scene where her character is acting. All of the characters are written so broadly there's not much anywhere for them to dig their teeth into.

Aside from being a movie about an alien monster who wants to go back home, this movie has nothing to do with E.T. and is much closer to Shyamalan's laughable The Happening. It's a loser and more silly than compelling or scary.

Stars: 1 of 4