EW Movie Review: "Super 8"
J.J. Abrams, the man behind the television hit “Lost” and 2009’s “Star Trek,” is bringing his latest to theaters this Friday, and it’s a catastrophic mess. Neil Rosen filed the following report.
To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.
Then come back here and refresh the page.
The next in a series of big budgeted, action-oriented summer movies heads into theatres. This week, it's something called “Super 8.”
The movie takes place in a small town in 1979 when a kid who recently lost his mom teams up with his best friend to shoot a super 8mm movie about zombies. The two teens both have a crush on the same girl that they've cast in their film. While shooting their movie, a truck intentionally hits a speeding train, followed by an over the top derailed crash sequence.
When unexplained disappearances and explosions wreak havoc in the town, it creates a mystery that an alert five-year-old can easily figure out.
“Super 8” is so bad, it defies explanation. The kids are cloyingly annoying and the script is boring beyond belief. It’s impossible to connect with any of the characters on an emotional level, and the mystery, once revealed, is even more pathetic.
The film was written and directed by J.J. Abrams, but it feels more like a really bad Steven Spielberg movie. Spielberg produced it, and it's actually worse than that his horrendous remake of “War of the Worlds,” which is saying a lot.
Kyle Chandler, from “Friday Night Lights,” is great, but his talents are wasted here.
It's the lame script, awful direction and total lack of heart or intelligence that makes this extremely agonizing to sit through. Perhaps if the viewer is between the ages of 10 and 12, he or she might get a kick out of this. Anyone else will have trouble making it to the end.
By the end, no one will care about what’s happening or why it’s happening. The kids are bad actors, so it’s hard to be interested in their well being or the town’s survival. The ending is also ridiculous. It's as if the filmmakers looked at “Stand By Me,” “The Bad News Bears,” “Cloverfield,” which Abrams produced, “The Blair Witch Project” and Spielberg's “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” took the worst elements from all those films and made this piece of junk.