Super 8

Ah, so many memories from the road trips that found us staying at the Super 8 motels. Oh... wait... I wasn't gonna right about a hotel chain. I was gonna talk about that new movie that's out now.

There, that's better. There are several movies that are out right now that I want to go see. It's summer time. That's kind of what happens. Movie makers put all these movies out that they know people will pay through the nose to see. For me, Super 8 had a lot of competition. After all, I still haven't seen Hangover II, X-Men: First Class, or the new Pirates movie.

But of those movies listed, Super 8 was the only one that I really didn't know much about going into it. From what I've heard, the Hangover sequel is almost a carbon copy of the original. And yeah, I want to see X-Men and Pirates, but where can they really go that they haven't been before? Can they really convince me to not wait for them to show up in the local Redbox?

I don't want to put down those other movies. And I don't want to make Super 8 out to be more than it is. But I will say I thought it was a pretty brilliant movie. It could easily just be the nostalgia of the thing that makes me feel so good about it. But that's something that did appeal to me, nostalgia.

Of course there were a lot of throwbacks in this movie. It's almost like it's J.J. Abrams' love letter to all things Spielberg. If Dawson Leery got to make a real movie, I think it would look a little something like this.

Don't go into it thinking of it as a monster movie. I mean, yes, there is a monster of extra-terrestrial origin. But to me, that was almost the B storyline. Really, the thing that grabbed me about the movie was the kids. These  characters who are just trying to make an amateur movie to enter into a film festival. They get caught up in the mysterious monster hunt that keeps going on in the background, but for them, that's what it is. It's background.

These kids aren't big names (except for Dakota Fanning's little sister). Who knows if they'll ever be big names (except for Dakota Fanning's little sister)? But in this movie, they were good. And as a group, they had good chemistry. The heart of this movie is in the way these kids interacted with each other, and, in some cases, in the way they interacted with their parents.

I think that grown-ups will really like this one. Especially if you grew up loving those classic Spielberg movies of the 80s. For me, it was well worth the price of admission.