Quick Review: Super 8

Here's the last of my writeups on the four movies I've seen recently. I'm caught up! (Except for two weeks' worth of comic books. And the Flyers suddenly went and blew up their team. And Roy Oswalt seems to be really hurting and might be out of the Phillies' rotation for an extended period. But more on those later.) "Super 8" is set in 1979, and in a small Ohio town we have a group of kids who are making a low-budget zombie movie. One night they're filming at a train station as a freight train is passing, when it is derailed, causing a massive crash. As the U.S. Air Force moves in, ostensibly to clean up the wreckage, strange things begin happening in the town. Dogs (and a few people) begin disappearing, there are power failures, and things turn a bit more sinister. The kids, while still making their movie, end up deeply involved in these events.

The trailers, with hints of some sort of creature, gave off a bit of a "Cloverfield" vibe, but fortunately "Super 8" has nothing in common with that overrated film except for camera footage being involved. "Super 8" is basically a Steven Spielberg mashup -- a little "E.T." here, some "Goonies" there -- directed by J.J. Abrams. Really, he's paying homage to Spielberg's early successes. However, Spielberg is a producer of the film. So does that make it an officially sanctioned homage? And is that a good thing? Might it have been more interesting if there were some twists in the Spielberg formula? It's well-done, the acting from a mostly unknown cast is fine, but it felt like I'd seen it before. And I did. In "E.T." and in "The Goonies" and... My grade: B.