Review of Super 8 (2011) by Normalpsycholog — 09 Jun 2011

I am going to try and be concise and keep it short. This movie hurt my life, my relationship, my wallet, and my brain.

Let's start by analyzing why it hurt my life. When we live, we want pleasure. Sexual, psychological, culinary, we simply want things that fulfill our needs and hopefully give us a little of what we want as well. As far as movies go, we want something wonderful, entertaining, fun, original, and skillful. Without those five things, I can't imagine someone enjoying a movie. This movie gave us none of those things. It was two hours of low-level suspense with children acting scared, excited, and adventurous. This movie was constantly loud, muddling any chance of becoming engrossed in its story or characters.

What was so endearing about the characters? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. There is no development at all. One has a mother who died, wow, now we care about him! One has braces and likes fireworks, what an interesting character! One's a fat director, oh wow, that's truly something special! Nothing about the cast works. It's one thing to pay homage to someone (in this case, Steven Spielberg), but it's another to just mish-mash everything you've seen together into one movie and hope for the best.

How did the movie hurt my relationship? It put me in a bad mood. After two hours of watching mind-numbing acting and a horrible story about a murderous alien who kills off people while building his spaceship, I was drained and unable to relate the way I normally do with my girlfriend. Rarely does a movie suck the life out of me like this. This alone should indicate that this film is trash, life-sucking trash.

How did it hurt my wallet? Movies never make me think about the ten dollars I just spent on them. Even if it's just a fun comedy like The Hangover 2, I don't mind shelling out hard-earned money to see it. This movie made me remember that I had used money for it. That and the gas to go see it (easily two dollars worth of gas). What movie makes someone remember that money was taken from them? This one.

Now, the most beautiful part, how the movie hurt my mind. At the end of the movie, roughly five people started clapping. I believe three of them were over-weight, Hispanic women, and the others I couldn't locate in the theater. I was thoroughly confused, beyond any confusion I've ever felt in my life before. I'm twenty-eight and I've seen a lot of things, this clapping phenomenon was one of the more bizarre. Why were they clapping? This wasn't sarcastic clapping, either, that I would've detected immediately and joined in on. This was genuine, "this movie was extremely good" clapping. What on Earth? Were they happy the alien had finally escaped Earth? Why were they happy for this alien who had killed several human beings? Were they happy for the town who now was free of a deadly alien who kept stealing their car engines and making their dogs run away from home? My god, why were they happy? People who watch "Lost" are possibly so enamored with the TV show that they force themselves to love this movie. Or maybe people who love Star Wars are so enamored with it that they force themselves to love this movie. I don't know what it is or what it was, but as an objective human being, this movie was trash. I suppose my biggest mistake was seeing the film at all -- especially having the ability to read about it beforehand, which I didn't. The movie must be more geared towards the 10-to-15-year-old crowd. Being over the age of 18 will not help you enjoy this film, I'll warn you now. Stay as far away from this film as possible, it can only hurt you.