108 - Super 8

    A group of young kids (middle school?) are shooting a movie when a nearby train is derailed.  The train is carrying a bizarre secret that affects the whole town, and brings the government in to contain the situation.
    That's as spoiler-free as I can get it.  But I can't maintain that level of secrecy.
    I was very happy with this movie at first.  The relationships between the kids, the brewing romance, the film they're working on, all of that was wonderful.  Once the plot kicks in, I felt a little disappointed.  The story involves an alien that the government has been holding and experimenting on, which is otherwise peaceable, but years of being held captive and being tortured has made it resent mankind.  It's been creeping around town, stealing electronics in an effort to build a ship to return home.  There's something vaguely Star Trek-like about the story.  The second half of the picture seems to be a homage to classic monster movies, wrapped up in a Twilight Zone/Star Trek ending.  This isn't terrible, and it didn't make me dislike the movie, but it just couldn't hold a candle to the strong opening.
    I found myself thinking of some comparisons to Stand By Me, which handles relationships in a similar fashion.  The romantic angle of this is a nice, but pushes a little too far.  The heartfelt conversation doesn't ring true.  Maybe if the content of it had been placed into a different context.
    There's one other thing that I wanted to point out.  Abrams has handled movies with some massive destruction before.  He produced Cloverfield, directed Mission: Impossible 3, and did both of the modern Star Trek movies.  He even wrote Armageddon!  He has a certain technique that I've gotten a little tired of.  He loves his lens flares, and I don't mind them most of the time.  But he combines those with handheld shots, in an effort to insert the viewer into the action.  I actually like this technique, but the problem is that he tends to do it way too often.
    His interest in spectacle destruction is a lot of fun.  What stood out in this movie was a sequence near the end.  The military is working on combing the evacuated town in an effort to recapture the alien.  The alien's influence over electrical parts has caused a lot of the heavy weapons to fire and target randomly.  This type of destruction is really wild.  I haven't seen anything like it.  It's one thing to see a skyscraper, or a large building crumble, or get knocked by a monster's tail.  This is a suburban town, and it looks like a neighborhood I would know.