SUPER 8 Post-Release Discussion

Not to  pimp out another site, but Devin's piece on Abrams over at BAD is a fantastic summation of the weird cult surrounding the guy.

The film is summed up by the alien. When it's teased, there's promise, but when the film has to deliver, it's curiously unmemorable.

There's a great final release poster at http://www.movieposterdb.com/poster/fa44e527. check it out.

How about I fuck your mother? Oh, you'll never read this because you joined only to spruik some shitty poster then disappear forever?

Well, god damn.

 

 

 

I really, really liked SUPER 8, but I don't think it's nostalgia porn like Devin suggests.  I do agree that it's two movies stuffed into one, and some of the shifts between the two are handled awkwardly.  But unlike a lot of reviewers, I liked the alien story quite a bit.  The alien isn't exactly a character, I'd agree, but I thought the build up to the creature was well done even though Abrams does drop the ball a little bit in the final story.

 

But the kids?  They're great.  All of their performances are genuine, and I bought them wholeheartedly.  I liked the relationship between Kyle Chandler and his son, and Elle Fanning and her father.  If Abrams had figured out how to nail the landing with the alien story this would have been a lot better than just good.

 

My daughter, though?  She freaking adored this film.  Just went nuts over it.  She laughed and jumped at the scary parts, and the best thing about SUPER 8 for me was seeing it with her and her reactions to it.  I think kids are going to flip for this movie.

What age you think will like this?

No CHUD review? And no review from Drew at HitFix, either? If I didn't know better, I'd say the film wasn't screened for critics.

 

Drew reviewed it a week ago.  As did Devin.  Not sure what the embargo situation was.

 

 

Really? Man, I missed those. Will go digging. Thanks.

 

It's too bad this alien invasion movie had to have aliens in it. Otherwise, it would have been my favorite movie of the summer.

I guess I'm having a selfish response to this movie. I made Super-8 movies with my friends when I was 12, and sometimes I think it was the best period of my life. So I was hoping for Super 8 to deal more consistently with the actual filmmaking, that perhaps these kids would just keep shooting throughout as chaos reigned and that their project would end up incorporating all that spectacular one-of-a-kind material. (Seriously, how does this movie NOT feature someone whipping out a camera during the spaceship climax? Even Close Encounters did that.)

 

I'd love to see (or make) a movie that communicated the thrill of shooting photochemical film, when you knew you only had three minutes to a reel, and that you couldn't erase or re-record, and that you'd have to wait a week for processing to see if anything worked. As it is we never see an actual film cartridge, or a footage meter counting down, or a projector being threaded.

 

In Super 8, the central gimmick is supposed to be that these kids accidentally film something super-secret. But by the time anyone views or has heard about their footage, half the characters already know that something VERY weird is going on and the movie completely forgets the film-within-a-film concept until the kids' project runs under the end credits. And judging from "The Case", the events of Super 8 don't seem to have affected these kids in any way aside from shooting that one scene at the wreck site.

 

But enough about me and the filmmaking career I never had. On its own merits, Super 8 seems about a draft away from a script that could have really tied everything together. The period detail is ridiculously cluttered, and the clutter seems uniform from one house to another. I did appreciate the nod to those great Aurora monster kits, and I'm pretty sure there was a TIE fighter model in there somewhere. Fanning is spectacularly good and the filmmakers were smart enough to give her a couple of showcase scenes. The kid who plays the fat director is kind of terrible.

Nice insight HH. I played with Super 8 in my time, but mostly for animation. The  financing was another aspect I felt that was missing - shit was pricey and you knew the value of every frame. Instead, Fatty just steals from his parents and problem solved. Where are all the mowed lawns, paper routes and car washes? The sacrifice? It made a shooting day a BIG day.

 

I must say those Monster kits were something I'd forgotten. As you say, a lot of the period detail was garbled (1950s bikes in that first School's Out sequence, then BMXs and 70s curvy framed bikes thereafter), but those monster kits really rang a loud bell for me and I never even owned one. I knew kids who did and that locked down the suspension of disbelief by quite a degree for me.

 

The "Production Value!" set up (and set up and set up and set up) weirdly seemed like it was missing a beat or pay-off. Firstly they don't even frame/record the passing train for it's supposed value (Tip: a waving a flashlight and a piece of cardboard off camera would create the same effect on the girl that the train ultimately has), but mostly it seemed like this kid was supposed to be SO keen on "production value" that a whole train load of Hollywood FX is delivered at high speed as if to order. I kinda expected a beat in there somewhere where the kid realizes there's such a thing as TOO MUCH production value. Even flipping back to the model train at the end seemed like that was meant to be connected to that theme. In fact I felt like there were a lot of dropped beats and bits of funky timing that seemed to defeat the dedication the movie shows to the Spielberg playbook in all other respects.

 

The Middle-Draft problem looks to be on the money. I felt that just when the movie started to be it's own thing and you started getting into the lives of the characters, the script would hit a page from the initial rough where it was just a conglomeration of moments from that period of 80s Amblin/Amblin-esque movies - like after that nice bit with the girl and the boy watching the super 8 film projected on his bedroom wall suddenly (acting as an emotional intermediary), they chuck in this moment straight from Explorers with the alien grommet blowing a hole in the wall. It's like that had been put in there earlier as a scene-ending idea before the dialogue was written and they had a sense of the scene's stand-alone strength. I don't doubt that's a reference that will be lost on most viewers, but it seems indicative of a fragmented/incomplete screenplay full of temporary page-filling swipes that accidentally made it into the final movie.

 

I did like that the fat kid was pre-growth spurt in the first bit of The Case. Somehow, that implied stretch of time between starting and finishing made it seem like it actually WAS an important thing to this small fat kid, rather than the over-sized spoiled brat he is during most of the movie.

 

Fanning is interesting, particularly within that cast.

 

Playing the spot-the-clone casting game on this I got:

Main Kid = Sean Astin (Doppelganger)

Fat Kid = Vern/Chunk (Archetype)

Brace Face = Data in White Face (Racist!)

The dark haired kid = Bastian/Daryl (Doppelganger)

Fanning = River Phoenix (Reincarnation)

Monster = Cloverfield (Pirate Software Download)

 

Tall Kid = No idea (Filmmakers also didn't seem to know what he was - he should have been the good looking, slimy one)

 

 

 

Not 'jumbled', but 'cluttered'. As if Abrams told the prop department "Send me all your '70s stuff" and they sent it all and he put every last piece of it in all the sets. Every wall has something chunky hanging on it, every flat surface is piled high with... stuff. That could have worked if it was only, say, the fat kid's house that was like that, for contrast.

 

Good catch on 'Charles' growing taller. Missed that.

Edited by Hammerhead - 1/8/12 at 2:26pm

Oh:

Kudos to you, sir.

You know in many ways, this is JJ Abram's "Superman Returns".   It clings so fetishistically to the Amblin/80's Spielberg look and feel that it forgets to tell a cohesive story or try to make its own mark.  It's not as bad as "Superman Returns" but nowhere near as fun or effortless as "Star Trek".     It's just a hard movie to critique because the stuff with the kids and the coming of age stuff was nicely done but the alien stuff seemed so underbaked in comparison.   I don't mind having seen it but I was expecting so much more.

Just got back, and I was with it until the scene with Joe talking to the alien about how it understood the thing's pain.  It took everything in me not to just laugh out loud at the sheer corniness of it.  And it only got cornier from there.  In a better movie, that bit where he lets go of the necklace would have packed at least a minor punch.  As it was, it did nothing but make me roll my eyes.  The kids are all great, and refreshingly natural.  Nothing showbizzy about any of them, though Elle Fanning gives Kristen Stewart a run for her money in the Mopey Olympics.  The tension and scares work well.  The action is well-shot, and I caught a lot of little winks and nudges to E.T. and Star Wars, from the flashlight scene in the cemetery to the kids constantly saying how they have a bad feeling about this.  I really can't quite put a finger on what would have made this better, but it falls in the "good, not great" category for me.  Crowd seemed to love it though.  Hearty applause at the end, and nearly everyone stayed through the credits to watch "The Case".

 

The dad just magically forgiving the other guy for his wife's death in a quick scene when he's spent the entire movie pissed about it was a big WTF.  Weird that I just saw this movie and cannot remember anyone's names.

Worth mentioning...

 

I weirdly saw this in a huge audience of kids. Biggest, and only applause from them other than the end? Kyle Chandler's ninja escape sequence from the military area.

 

I've always liked Kyle Chandler, but I gotta say, he was so so so excellent in this. I think he finds the depth of character in a cliched role of the stern-but-caring father, and really delivers in the moments with his son where he's clearly being tough to overcompensate for a lack of knowledge about being a single father. Really great, subtle work.

The necklace bit would have worked if they hadn't milked it by having the lid flip open to reveal Mom's picture. WE. GET. IT.

 

Meanwhile, I realized something else: There's nothing Spielbergian at all about the first crush/young love subplot. That's a different genre, one that SS to this day has never actually explored in his own films.

The whole family feud thing bugged me. As long as they don't spell it out, you think the guy just made a mistake and killed Joe's mom. Fine. Then they go into a spiel about how he was drunk and didn't show up for work and so Mom was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which seems a pretty thin basis for Kyle Chandler to decide to arrest him when he comes to her wake and forbid his son from associating with the entire bloodline. Would Jack be as pissed if he had missed work because he had a cold, or was waiting for the cable guy to show up?

 

Also, the scene of the entire military misfiring bugged me in a very nerdy way. I get the monster interfering with electronics, but tanks and guns are entirely mechanical. Making those malfunction seems like stopping a hammer from making a nail go into a piece of wood. With that kind of power, how was it even captured or held? Couldn't it just stop the hearts of everyone in a one-mile radius? Especially when it's able to just bust out of its cage.

Somebody nailed the alien when they said it`s teaser scenes are excellent, but but seeing it in action in the third act not so much.  It`s essentially a more intelligent less killy version of Jaws.  I think my friend nailed the description as Goro and Cloverfield having a love child.

Yeah, I thought it was a drunk driving incident. Which makes the kid getting in the car that may have killed his mother a little disturbing. But I can't think for the life of me what job that alcoholic dude would do that the kid's mother would be able to stand in as his replacement. Power to the Sisters and all that but they really seemed like quite different physical types.
 

The power being displayed was Psychokinetic. Which means the remote moving of physical objects. But yeah - where/how was that level of power being generated? Was that what the creature was building? A kinetic electromagnet of some kind to draw in all the cubes (smash them out of their crates etc)?

 

I wish they'd used that water-tower image a bit better. Like seeing more and more stuff sticking to as the movie progresses. Seeing the cube rattling against it just made me think it was trying to get thru the tank to the other side and off into the hills or whatever.

 

Also, was it just me or did those dogs "running away in sheer terror" at the gas station look like the jolliest bunch of pooches you ever saw in your life? I was thinking up until the map bit, that the alien was eating them T-Rex style.

 

 

If it was stated, I can't remember, but was it ever said why the dogs were being taken in the first place?  The alien wasn't eating them, so why were they vanishing only to pop up in different counties?  Was the alien just fucking with people by taking their pets away?

The alien had me until it started eating people. I feel like Abrams wanted the loneliness and yearning to get home of ET, but the bite and horror of Clovie/War of the Worlds and I stopped hoping the alien would get away when he had that person's foot in his mouth. I understand it, he's been trapped here a while, but they go through great psychic pains (of the telling, not showing variety) to make it seem like the thing is just misunderstood and then blow it when it starts killing people. Also, the central premise of 'sometimes bad things happen', I can see that working for someone who lost his mother in an accident, but when you've been stranded on a distant planet for over twenty years, tortured and dissected, that stops being a 'sometimes bad things happen' scenario and starts becoming a 'willful evil in this universe out to destroy you' scenario. I may have applauded, or at least gone 'oh shit!' if the alien had straight up eaten Joe at that point.

 

Kids were great though. Abrams can know childhood dialogue really, really well.

I get telekinesis, but only applicable to firearms and military vehicles? If the monster has that level of power and control, why is it wasting time picking people up and scarfing them? It's like, I don't know, one of us trying to toast bread with our breath instead of dropping it in a toaster.

I thought it was obvious that (A) the alien's effect on technology was magnetic, not psychokinetic, and (B) all the dogs ran away because they sensed the alien's presence before the humans did.

I just got back from seeing an early-morning screening. It was okay; I felt like the emotional core of the movie was mis-*LOUD CRASHES / ALIEN SOUNDS*

Shit "telekinetic" is what it should read. Psychokinetic is Akira-style mind powers yo. Though obviously the creature is telepathic too.

 

I'd argue some kind of rough Alien Tech Telekinetic Engine over magnetic, simply because THAT'S WHAT WE SEE IN THE MOVIE.

 

Is it well thought out? No. Like the creature itself, it exists only to serve the requirements of the plot and general spectacle/Spielberg Riffing.

 

Yeah, the map shows a relatively neat ring of Doggy GTFO. Standard "Animal Sensitivity" trope in SF/Supernatural tension-building scenes.

 

Juan C eating people was just really poorly thought out. They should have had it eating/mutilating cows for the UFO lore tie-in. Having the victims hung upside down was just a piece of lousy business that served nothing. The girl was snatched for no really good reason and she would have been fine if it hadn't chosen her for a last minute snack before leaving in his spaceship.

 

It even raises the question of why they're unconscious beyond being a plot device. Does the creature have the ability to telepathically stun people? I would have loved to see evidence of that throughout the movie rather than limp Spielberg riffs. If it has to eat bulk meat, let it chow cow.

 

 

EDIT: LOL at D.T.

I think this is a solid entry in the Amblin lineup, about as good as the last movie in this spirit, which was the much less hyped Monster House.  It would be no great trick for somebody to punch holes through this one, but it was fun and I was surprised to find the kids to be uniformly good.  And here's to one day seeing Noah Emmerich in a role where he isn't a dick.

What a half-assed film. The only thing that redeems it is the idea that maybe the monster is kind of an incarnation of Joe Lamb's grief, lashing out against the world -- and since the movie draws big parallels between the boy and the creature, I think that metaphor can be conjured effectively. The problem is, even if you take a psychological reading of the movie's entire narrative, we're stuck with a Spielberg-approved E.T. rip-off. The monster is an outward manifestation of inner turmoil in both films, satisfying desires for connection and understanding -- for E.T. this is a lot more fleshed out, of course, since in Super 8 we only get that scene at the end to really draw the connection between Lamb and the alien.

 

That's why the whole movie fails. There is a hell of a lot more effort spent on building up the monster as a being of wanton destruction than anything deserving of our sympathies, and so that moment between the two of them in the tunnel falls flat. So I guess I'm agreeing with all the people who say it's two movies mashed together incoherently, since the reason, thematically, that they're mashed together in the first place is extremely tenuous and basically tacked-on. Also this movie is fucking boring. The kids do all of nothing for 45 minutes after the train crash, just hanging around pretty much. Why can't they go looking for the alien almost immediately, giving us some narrative drive? Instead they wait three days while the film gets developed doing jack-shit and "bonding," I guess, in the case of Lamb and the girl, even though the poor writing pretty much prevents that from happening.

 

I gotta say though, I LOVED the beat where he lets go of the locket. Just a fantastic visual metaphor and maybe even iconic -- it gave me chills actually. It is so good that Abrams probably came up with that moment first, and then worked backwards from it.

Super 8 is the best sequel since Leonard Part 6.

 

Nah, sorry, I haven't seen it yet. I overslept the opening midnight show. I'm sure it's okay.

Agreed 100%. That moment is so great that it is a shame that the rest of the film couldn't live up to it (and yes, when the locket opens up it's quite on-the-nose, but it absolutely works as a case of classic Spielberg audience manipulation).

Yeah man. Another slightly on-the-nose but more subtle bit (which I think slipped under the radar for a lot of people in my theater) comes during the first confrontation scene in the house between Joe and his dad, when the father claims that the town's safety is now in his hands because the responsibility's fallen to him after the disappearance of the sheriff -- "there used to be someone else, but now I have to do it alone" he says, or something to that effect (I'd like it if anyone could remember the exact line). And immediately after he says those words, both characters realize how applicable they are to their own situation and how fucking hypocritical he's being by NOT applying the same logic to the problems confronting his own family.

 

It's the kind of really important, weighty character beat that the movie is otherwise devoid of: in one concise little moment, it shows that the father's motivation for "saving" the town is to make up for his failing to emotionally connect with his son after the mother's death, and is directly related to his struggle to adjust to the burdens of being a single father. Of course, it seems like it was almost an accident, a nugget of drama Abrams just kind of stumbled across, since the movie seems to be inept at making any more connections of such genuine emotion.

I actually kinda loved it, flaws and all. Yeah it was manipulative and the confrentation witht he ailen was definatly a "what" as Carey said when the ailen ran off. But it worked for me.

 

My favorite carachter bit was Charles asking Joe if he could "do this without him". The whole big brother kinda thing.

 

I saw it in a theatre with that Regal RPX...that train crash was freaking epic. Best sound I've ever heard.

Whereas IMO it's a bit extreme to call Super 8 a rehash of ET, it's true that the alien's aggressive behaviour makes the whole 'It's just scared and wants to go home' angle a little more difficult to swallow.

 

It seems I enjoyed it a lot more than a lot of folks round here, but I agree the film has a lot of lingering problems that stop it from feeling entirely cohesive. A huge chunk of it may have an alien on the rampage, but in the end it's really not an 'alien on the rampage' movie. The alien is a MacGuffin, there to speed along the personal story of Joe and his dad. While it's sound storytelling practice in material like this to keep the emotional core to the forefront, letting the more fantastical stuff feed it on a thematic level, Abrams just can't let go of his love of piling mystery upon mystery until we're not sure where the hell we are. The cubes, the army, the dogs, the attacks, the psychic linkage/science teacher backstory... I can understand people not connecting with the emotional story when the thing that's meant to be scaffolding it gets so bloody ADD.

 

That said, I did connect strongly with the emotional core, albeit mostly because through personal experience. The film does capture the sort of emotional limbo that happens in the wake of bereavement very well, with the characters still trying to get their heads around the impossible-to-deal-with even happening in the first place before they can even think of dealing with it. Joe and his dad are in a state of utter confusion, which the performances express beautifully. The locket moment... Well yeah, it's cheesy, but dammit if it didn't work on me.

 

Overall I enjoyed the film a lot. It feels like a long time since I've seen a movie with kids on an adventure acting like real people, with real peril hovering over their heads, and it was a great stab at replicating the 80s Amblin classics  without it feeling TOO much like nostaligia overkill. I agree that this is an important step for Abrams as a creator of character-driven stories; now we just have to see him tame that compulsion toward stacking mysteries in a pile like narrative Jenga, and we might see him get close to The Beard's level of game.

Yeah I have a hard time hating it. Its just a love letter to a nostalgic period (Spielberg's films in particular) that I have a hard time hating.

 

Truth is the film is a mess and yeah the creature and more importantly the story don't work.

 

I was entertained but realized as I left the theater that they marketed this film perfectly because there just isn't much to sell this kind of film anymore.

 

The movie its setting and the alien stuff actually weirdly enough comes off like a breath of fresh air during these days of Transformers and these self aware Pixar/Shrek films.

 

Its just sad the movie combines this intimate story and the alien's story together and does so poorly I might add.

 

The performances outside of Emmerich (A paper plate could play that role it was so straight) buoy the film.

 

I am starting to really question if Abrams knows what a good script is. This script or story rather is a good draft or two away from being something special but as it is its massively flawed.

 

Yeah that ending shot is brilliant and hollow I didn't feel that much it wasn't earned. There should have been an Iron Giant like moment with that creature acting heroically to save those kids from the military or something to establish a connection.

 

This is such a strange time to watch movies. You see so many young writer directors who simply don't have the story or don't have directing skills to elevate thin material. Or you see filmmakers like Peter Jackson (King Kong) Or Zach Snyder (Sucker Punch) given carte blanch to go hog wild. Abrams fits the later category to a T.

 

I would have preferred Abrams making a small movie about these kids making that Zombie film and Joe coming to terms with his life. Then another film about an Alien that escapes.

 

As it is Super 8 is so frustrating because it had such a good chance of being special. Instead its rather forgettable.

 

*edited to add its interesting I read the worms eye view just now and Joshua as well said 2 scripts.

I don't know -  like you said, the script feels a draft or two away from its fighting weight but it's a story that should work. The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to think that Abrams didn't really figure out what he wanted the 'alien hunt' part of the film to be, because it's tonally all over the place. I mean, we get that the alien's trying to work through a traumatic experience just like Joe is, but it never looks frightened or vulnerable - it's always on the offensive until the very end of the movie when Joe confronts it.

 

We figure out it's been trying to rebuild its ship, which is why it keeps stealing car parts, but it never comes across as a creature capable of something like that until we're told it via the science teacher's film reel (Which plays like an expository cut scene from Metal Gear Solid) We never see the alien act intelligently, just clambering and attacking. I'm playing 'armchair filmmaker' here I know, but it felt like it needed a scene where we see the alien, or parts of it anyway, rooting through cars examining parts, something that still leaves us baffled as to what it's doing but at least shows us that it's capable of higher order thinking. Problem is, Abrams is gunning so hard for his big 'the creature was cool all along' twist that he obscures this stuff.

 

In a way, the film's a reprise of the 'personal story within a fantastical one' premise of Cloverfield. Despite the flaws it is an improvement, if only because the characters are far, far more personable than Cloverfield's clueless yuppie posse.

"Whereas IMO it's a bit extreme to call Super 8 a rehash of ET"

 

This reminded me - is it just me or did anyone else notice that the creature has ET Face at the end? (once all those vagi-folds settle down and the goo goo eyes make an appearance) I'd have to see it again to be 100% sure, but I'd say there's another riff there.

 

Nick says in his review that this thing was rushed into production after JJ pitched Spielberg the most basic premise. Makes sense, but holy shit the fat kid must have sprouted over-night.

Actually, its eyes change from alien to Bruce Greenwood. No joke.  They used him for motion/facial capture.

I really enjoyed the film. While I was not a huge fan of the alien design, I understand that they wanted him to look monstrous and scary. It looked so much like the Cloverfield alien and the red alien creature from Star Trek.

The acting was top notch. This film put its all behind a group of child actors and it paid off. The sound mix for the train wreck had me grinning from ear to ear.

So this film only had a budget of $50 million. Close to $100 after advertising I'm sure.

I've probably said my peace, but Josh Miller's bit on the main site about the inept handling of the fathers' arcs reminded me of another idiotic part of this movie: the fat director kid getting left behind to tend to the injured one at the end, while Joe goes off with random, undeveloped pyro kid. The movie spends quite a bit of time developing the friendship between Joe and the director -- if the script had them teaming up to save the girl at the end, rather than splitting up, the opportunity would be there to draw the arc of their friendship to a natural conclusion, resolving the tension between them that arose due to their mutual crushes on the girl. Instead, the plot demands that the pyro kid come along so he can distract the monster with his firecrackers, which is fucking pointless since Joe could've just brought the fireworks with him anyway. It's a real head-scratcher.

 

Another GOOD detail, though, is the monster building its lair underneath the graveyard where Joe's mom is buried -- which also strengthens the idea that the monster is a symbolic outward manifestation of Joe's grief.

Christ, I SEE it.

 

Fuckin' hell, me too. That's hilarious and oddly disturbing all at once.

 

Thinking about the film last night, I realized what it was about the 'alien was vulnerable all along' angle that rubs me wrong: for a benevolent-but-misunderstood creature, it sure goes after a lot of innocent people. The sheriff and soldiers I understand - they were armed and had aggressive intent. But the gas station kid? The woman with hair rollers? Alice? Are we supposed to buy that a lifeform that's sophisticated enough to build a spaceship out of carburettors doesn't have the intelligence to deduce basic behaviour?

 

And another thing - can anyone remember if the thing with the missing dogs was properly resolved? I felt what they were getting at was that the alien was eating them but moved on to more substantial human meals, and they were doing the classic hypocritical Hollywood move of showing mass murder of humans but getting all delicate when killing dogs comes into it. The thing is, I can't remember anyone saying a thing about what was actually happening. Did I miss something?

 

Hope it's not out of order, but Devin really nails the fuck out of what's wrong with the monster's storyline in his latest "spoiler" review over at BAD. Comparing it to King Kong's story etc. Basically you can't have the alien do what it does and not die at the end.

 

50 mill is a good price. They got "Production Value!" for money - JJ should hand back his writer's fee though.

I was also going to ask what was going on with the whole dog angle.  It's like they use it to hit an emotional beat and then moved on to something else.

 

Yeah, he raises some good points. In fact, I'd argue that that kind of moral take on a monster's fate is even more applicable to the Super 8 alien than Kong in that the alien isn't an animal: based on the evidence the movie gives us, it should be perfectly capable of understanding what it's doing and makes it twice as strange why it apparently needs to mind-meld with some random kid to do so.

 

But at the end of the day, the alien is meant to be this highly sophisticated and sensitive creature. That's its essential nature, according to the story. It happens to spend virtually the entire running time running amok like some ungodly amalgam of Godzilla and Charlie Sheen because it's like, totally freaking out, man, and who are we to judge? Right?

 

The creature's a MacGuffin. It's there to provide symbolism that scaffolds the emotional story, and Abrams' mistake is overcomplicating the alien story to the point where it runs haywire and actively distracts from the emotional core.
 

 

Edited by Workyticket - 6/12/11 at 4:55pm

I don't think the creature really qualifies as a MacGuffin. Your average MacGuffin doesn't have any symbolic significance basically by definition, and doesn't really interact with the emotional story at all -- I imagine MacGuffins as being basically inert. The characters chase them, without them really having any momentum or thematic significance of their own.

 

If the alien in Super 8 is a MacGuffin, then so is the shark in Jaws. But they're not MacGuffins -- they're just the antagonists in those respective stories.

I've been late to the summer season and enjoyed it well enough, but I agree that it's just so strange that the monster is eating people and still getting a pass. I even thought for a moment when Joe and Alice come across the sheriff and the old lady in the creature's lair they were going to explain the monster spared them after exchanging thoughts and coming to some understanding of mankind's redeeming qualities or something.

 

But no, he's just snacking down on the town. And he still got an "Awwwww" during his big close up.

 

 

ETA: And I agree with that earlier post. It would have made more sense to have the pudgy director kid go with Joe instead of the pyromaniac. Just have him give Joe the fireworks at the wrecked house before they depart and you've got the same events with the pair saving Annie complete with Alice giving fat kid an appreciative peck on the cheek for maximum audience swoon.