Super 8

Since so many people are talking about it, we decided to have a look at "Super 8" this evening. I don't want to give away cool things about the film, but it is sort of a mixture of "Die Drei Fragezeichen", "E.T.", and "Romeo and Juliet". Well, okay, E.T. if the kids hadn't found him and sent him home, but the military had gotten their fingers on him.

There was always a kind of rumor going around that the military had caught some guys from outer space and their flying saucers.....

Anyway, the film opens to a suburban area that gives me quite a shock, as it looks just like where I grew up. We had houses like that, that exact same door with the three windows in it, and the hills looked very much like that. Officially, the film plays in Ohio, but it was filmed in West Virginia, on that little panhandle that sticks up between Ohio and the part of Pennsylvania I am from. The downtown shots were just so authentic, the cars, the middle school. Gave me a bit of the shivers.

Anyway, these kids love to make Super 8 films, and the actors are quite something. Alice is only 13 in real life (looks older than Joel) and has a filmography other actresses would give their souls for. And she really does a good job, as does Joel, although it gets corny in the end.

The fx, however, got on my nerves. It was like they wanted to get just one more stupid flying burning thumping groaning thing in there, and then another and another. It didn't fit the plot, many were quite senseless. And silver is not magnetic, but I can't really say more on that.

I really felt the fx to be quite overdone, that detracted from the story that was meager to start with. And the translation was painful, if you go see it, try and get it in English. There were strained translations all the time, but when Joel asks the driver for a crowbar, the German translation is rendered "wagenkreuz" instead of "brechstange", which does not even fit to the pictures, much less what they are doing there.

It's not the film of the year, IMHO, but if you do go see it, keep you seat when the credits start to roll, or you will miss the absolute highlight of the film!