Super 8 is great! (boxed spoilers)

[AlsoNamedBort]

@FlightlessBird

I really liked it and so did the group I was with. My 9yo nephew thought it was a bit scary and loud, his friend thought it was cool. But we couldn’t figure this out:

Why did the alien take some humans and kill others?
Why did he hang them upside down under the water tower?

I liked the slow progression of showing the whole body. I also approved that he wasn’t very cuddly.

I think he was taking people for food. He went out at night to grab parts and people, and then he worked during the day, using humans as snacks. I think the only people he killed outright were those antagonizing him, like the military.

[salinqmind]

Rex Reed in The NY Observer online wrote a review this week and SPOILED it with no warning in his review. What an ass. I don’t think he knows, or cares about, the concept of the word ‘spoiler’. He should stick to reviews of tired old has-beens who’ve scraped together a cabaret act in some NY hole-in-the-wall.

[Zebra]

@medstar

I saw the movie earlier today and also loved it. I agree with the points made earlier; my puzzling scene was when the monster grabbed a hold of Joel and was about to munch on him when Joel said something about some things or some people are bad but you don’t need to do this . . . The monster looked at him and then put him down and got back to work on his ship. What did that mean, that just because some people are bad , don’t judge everyone else?

Well

in the files of the science teacher, and when he, the science teacher, was in the hospital with the Col. he said that when he was touched by the creature that a psychic bond was instantly created. When the boy was picked up, the boy, being pure of heart, was able to communicate to the creature that he meant him no harm and that he wanted to help the creature. So the creature let him go.

[Jorge_Burrito]

The ending came off as a little too harrah everything is magically better now type thing, but the movie was pretty good. The finished zombie movie was classic. Anyone else was hoping that after the credits

the alien came back with his friends and blew earth to smithereens or was that just me?

[Red_Barchetta]

Went in with high expectations and left disappointed. Not a bad film by any stretch, but there was much that could have been done better. I also thought the way in which they resolved the initial mysteries was lame and extremely anti-climatic.

[don_t_ask]

Saw it this afternoon at a session with lots of pre and early teens. I assumed from the quiet that they all had a good time.

[Neidhart]

I spotted an anachronism: the school should have been a Junior High, not a Middle School.

Loved the film otherwise.

There are obvious traces of an earlier draft of the script in which Alice’s father got drunk at the mill and actually caused the accident that killed the kid’s mom, instead of just not being at work that day so the mom had to cover his shift.

[diggerwam]

It was OK. Came in with HIGH expectations. I was expecting more “stand by me” vibe with the kids. Can’t really put a finger on what I’d change except making the script snappier/funnier. I seem to remember all those 80’s Speilberg movies being funny.

I came home & watched “Starman” on Netflix. That put a tear in my beer.

[Equipoise]

You didn’t think it was funny? I thought there was a lot of humor in the movie, though most of it was in the first half of course. There were so many amusing moments, even little things, such as when Alice pulls up in the car, sees Joel and angrily says “You’re the deputy’s son!” and Joel gets a big grin on his face and says “You knew that?” which I guess isn’t funny on paper, but he’s so adorable and his reaction says more than 3 pages of exposition/dialogue would have.

[Taomist]

@Neidhart

I spotted an anachronism: the school should have been a Junior High, not a Middle School.

Side topic: I use the terms interchangeably. Though I’m aware there a year or so differences depending on the school system, there’s elementary school (K-5/6 grades), jr. high/middle school (6/7-8/9 grades) and high school (6/9-12 grades).

So…what is middle school, if not jr. high? Honest question, not being snarky; I have always wondered if there was a difference, as I grew up calling it jr high, since that was what they were all actually named. Haines Jr. High, represent!
ETA: Wow. The wiki on this is surprisingly long! Middle school - Wikipedia

Guess I did go to a jr high, as the teacher setup was identical to the high school’s. Previously, in elementary, we had the same teacher all day; that changed in Jr high. And in middle school, it doesn’t change as much. Interesting distinction, and thank you for bringing it up, as I surely never would have known otherwise.

Conceptual distinctions

Junior high schools were created for the purpose of “bridging the gap between the elementary and the high school,” a concept credited to Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University.[13] The faculty is organized into academic departments that operate more or less independently of one another. The middle school movement in the United States saw this model as inadequately addressing the intended purpose of transition by maintaining an emphasis on the high school model, as reflected in the “junior high” designation.

The middle school concept often involves a group of two to eight teachers, depending on the school, from different disciplines working as a team with the same group of students of the same grade level, with each teacher teaching a different subject. This format facilitates interdisciplinary units, where part or all of the entire team teaches on the same general topic from the perspective of different disciplines. The middle school philosophy also advocates assigning students in each team to a homeroom. By having homeroom daily for various discussions and activities, middle schools try to foster a sense of belonging in students to ease social and emotional difficulties during adolescence.[citation needed]

Middle school in North America carries with it associations of personal and emotional difficulty. Physical and hormonal changes that accompany adolescence are exacerbated by newfound self-consciousness, social pressures, and the desire for conformity and identity.[14][15][16]
[edit] Configurations

Middle school is often used instead of junior high school when demographic factors increase the number of younger students.[17] Whereas junior highs tend to only include grades 7 and 8, middle schools are usually grades 6, 7, and 8 (i.e. around ages 11–14), varying from area to area and also according to population vs. building capacity. Other common models includes grades 5–8, and grades 7-9. Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island junior high schools (the term “middle school” is not commonly used) include only grades 7 to 9, with the first year of high school traditionally being grade 10.

The middle school format has now replaced the junior high format by a ratio of about ten to one in the United States, but at least one school district had integrated both systems in 2010.[18]

[Dewey_Finn]

I saw it today and liked it a lot. It helped that JJ Abrams was so secretive about it, and that I avoided reading too much about it. (Normally, I read all sorts of reviews of and articles about movies before I see them. Actually, normally, I don’t even see movies this in the run but I wanted to be surprised.)

Salon.com ran an article about how the movie referenced a bunch of Spielberg movies (I only read the headline) so I was looking for those. I saw references to Close Encounters and E.T. Perhaps there were others.

[Nayna]

Finally got to the theater today! We did love it, and my daughter is absolutely the perfect age for this movie. She had a great time, and spent a lot of time clutching my t-shirt.

[RikWriter]

I saw it today. I thought that it was very well acted and well made, but I found the resolution disappointingly unoriginal.

[Rand_Rover]

I really liked it and thought it was awesome. (Inevitable but . . .) BUT . . .

[spoiler]

1. The kids going to the school and doing some quick research gave me terrible flashbacks to Battlefield Earth. Granted, the kids didn’t learn to fly harriers just from reading books, but it still seemed a bit contrived. Maybe they could have found Woodward on their way out of the base and he could have told them (but I guess that could have been hokey as well, and of course as written Woodward was dead at that point).

2. I wondered why there was so much tension between the two dads just because bad dad missed his shift–I agree with the person above who said that the original version must have been much worse as far as his culpability.

3. The ending seemed strange–basically the alien just got his ship together (using the little blocks that the air force conveniently drove back through town) and took off. It’s unclear why he couldn’t have done that at any other point in the movie (say, immediately after exiting the train). I thought the kids were going to give him the block they stole to complete the puzzle (but of course that idea flew through the wall, I suppose). Did I miss something here?[/spoiler]

That sounds like a lot of bitching and moaning, but I really did like the movie.

[AlsoNamedBort]

@Rand_Rover

[spoiler]

3. The ending seemed strange–basically the alien just got his ship together (using the little blocks that the air force conveniently drove back through town) and took off. It’s unclear why he couldn’t have done that at any other point in the movie (say, immediately after exiting the train). I thought the kids were going to give him the block they stole to complete the puzzle (but of course that idea flew through the wall, I suppose). Did I miss something here?[/spoiler]

That sounds like a lot of bitching and moaning, but I really did like the movie.

[spoiler]The big machine he was building under the water tower attracted all the cubes to that point and turned them back into a spaceship. That’s what the deal with all the stuff going missing was. He was going out at night to steal stuff to build his machine.

I think he could have left somewhat earlier, but he was staying around to attack the military, making their weapons are going crazy. That was the deal with his conversation with the kid. He told him that he knew things sucked for him ,but he could just go now.[/spoiler]

[Ibn_Warraq]

One thing I was a bit confused by was that early in the movie when referring to Joel a woman mentions him having a “Step-father” who will help him through the tragedy, but throughout the movie, Kyle Chandler is referred to as his “dad” and Chandler refers to him as “son”.

Furthermore, we never see any “you’re not my father” scenes which I actually expected and which, if Chandler was the step-father, would have been natural.

So, was Chandler his father or his step-father?

[AlsoNamedBort]

I think you misheard. She never said step father.

[Ibn_Warraq]

@AlsoNamedBort

I think you misheard. She never said step father.

I guess I must have.

[GIGObuster]

@AlsoNamedBort

[spoiler]The big machine he was building under the water tower attracted all the cubes to that point and turned them back into a spaceship. That’s what the deal with all the stuff going missing was. He was going out at night to steal stuff to build his machine.

I think he could have left somewhat earlier, but he was staying around to attack the military, making their weapons are going crazy. That was the deal with his conversation with the kid. He told him that he knew things sucked for him ,but he could just go now.[/spoiler]

Close, but I think that:

The knowledge the kid had with model making was the most important bit that the alien used as his “aha!” moment. I think then the creature realized that even if all the pieces were not there anymore that he could do a model of the original ship just big enough to support only one of his kind.

[Rilchiam]

Saw it Friday night with friends, and wore my Lillian Steel shirt. The crew got them as freebies at the end of the shoot, and Mr. Rilch got one in my size instead of his. I’ve been wearing it around for the past year, waiting for it to become recognizable. Mr. Rilch is, funnily enough, back in that neck of the woods, working on another film. Some of the other crew members were also on Super-8, and they saw it Saturday. His name was in the credits, twice in fact, because he was on both the L.A. crew and the West Virginia crew. He said I’d never hear the trains the same way again. He was right.

ETA: And the director kid is so Abrams’ avatar.