Super 8
Dir: J.J. Abrams
2011
***
J.J. Abrams is the new king of post-production, he knows how to sell his films and to be fair he also knows how to start a story and get the audience hooked. It's just a shame he's not so good at ending them. Super 8 works as a tribute to the child-friendly sci-fi 80's films of directors such as Steven Spielberg and Joe Dante, but it has very little of that 'Summer blockbuster' magic. Super 8 is fun, there really isn't anything wrong with it, but it does not live up to the hype, in fact the ending is just so disappointing, I felt stupid in getting so excited by it in the first place. I thought the original concept was that the whole thing was caught on camera by a group of kids on their Super 8 camera? In the end, the Super 8 film they were making was so unimportant that you wonder why it got its name. In my opinion, they should have got a director such as Frank Darabont in for a re-write and given him directional duties, then I believe it could have been great instead of just okay. J.J. Abrams comes across to me as a great pretender.