Friday, June 10, 2011

Super 8!


Super 8 -- 4.5/5

** Just to warn everyone, I will have some majors spoilers in this post, so my recommendation would be just to go see the movie before you read this :D**



There are hundreds of great and fabulous reviews of Super 8 as of now, so why should I just repeat what everyone's saying? Either way, here's a recap: Super 8 is totally a love letter from JJ to Spielberg that is a mesh of ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cloverfield, The Goonies...I can go on and on. However, aside from the super long list of similar films, this movie is probably one of the only original (not sequel, not comic book, not famous and fabulous book series) movies of this summer. That being said, I strongly feel like the two movies that most closely parallel ET direction and plot-wise, while having a similar monster design as Clover-
field.
The paralleling of ET is probably the reason why I totally love this movie. From the amount of times I've seen ET, I know the movie back and forth and I can quote the whole movie probably on request. I'm sure this also applies to Mr. JJ Abrams, because there are a few shots in Super 8
that are pretty much exactly like ET. Remember the scene where our faithful alien E.T. escapes the evil bad-guys with their flashlights (which the bad guys in Super 8 have some flashy flashlights as well!)? Well, there's a shot of the town in Super 8 that was almost a carbon-copy of the shot. The endings are also similar in that the kids and parents watch the
space ship go away into oblivion. Fabulous.
There are also countless plot points that are super similar. There is a missing parent, the leading young male has a crush on the super tall blonde chick (small, but could be a parallel :D), the gang of kids who work together against the bad guys in the end, the alien in Super 8 builds something out of junk so he can get home...ahahaha that one made me laugh the most I think.
Michael Giacchino's score for Super 8 also sounds extremely similar to John William's for ET. I wish I had a great example on me, but there's one little theme the begins with the same chord progression as one in ET. I have an exert of the Super 8 score (something that was hard to find), but I also have the exact example from the ET score that I spoke about previously (it's at about the minute mark, I wish I had an example of the Super 8 one I was talking about, and I hope this is the right theme I was thinking of...).




Well, aside from all those ET parallels, the alien looks a little too much like the one from Cloverfield. I even have an example picture!

And that about sums it up! If you read this without seeing it, just go see it. It's just...the best summer movie thus far, barely better than X-Men.

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