There is something disheartening about not liking something that is trying so very hard to get you to like it. And Super 8 jumps up on your lap and purrs and licks your face. It does everything it can to get you to feel like you were touching a member of the opposite sex for the first time and not being able to catch your breath. But it stops short of any real intimacy, a series of rose-colored moments that never get the viewer dirty, in the best or the worst sense of that word.

Basically, Super 8 is a live-action episode of Robot Chicken, as delivered by a Steven Spielberg tribute band.

If you want to be reminded just how mighty Mr. Spielberg is as an audience-thrilling, heart-pounding, emotion-yanking director, you should see Super 8… because it is practically a textbook on how to make a 70s/80s Spielberg movie… with all the dryness of a textbook and none of the magic of a movie master.

To offer more information than you need to know, I went back to the film a second time, truly confounded by how my feelings about the film ranged from ambiguous to mildly aggravated. It’s so beautifully shot. It’s so well production designed. Mike Giacchino did such a great John Williams impression. But it’s a f-ing mess of a movie if you think about it for a second… which is, perhaps, why there isn’t a second of thought allowed as the experience zooms by.

The second time around, things started settling into clearer focus… like how many times the film does something (example: kids taken away from town) just to go back on itself and reverse the dramatic event that just occurred (example: kids find a way to go right back into town). Even worse, there are major elements that play as though they are important… but turn out to be irrelevant to the progress of the story. And these are not MacGuffins. They are, most often, familiar reference points to many movies we have all see, scratching our nostalgic itch, and then disappearing into the giant puddle of discarded, rotting movies-of-our-youths flesh.

The most offensive thing in the film, for me, is not all that offensive, because the film is so emotionally disconnected, even as it tries oh so hard to rip the tears from our eyes, that real offense is too strong an emotion to attach.

SPOILER WARNING

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The movie opens with a dead mother. There are references to this throughout the film, the most bizarre one at the end. But it is not really driving the movie in any way. They cut to “Four Months Later” from the opening sequence… and the kid seems to be unchanged. The movie is really about him coming of age and falling in love for the first time… and the dead mother adds nothing. Except…

At the end of the film, as the 6-legged-freak is pulling every piece of metal to one spot for no apparent reason – since the only metal it needs is very specific and all the other metal would probably keep it from escaping – the kid’s metal necklace with a picture of him and his mother in it is being pulled from his hand.

Now, if the film had shown him having a really broken life because of the loss of his mother and he had to let go of her to save himself and/or his father… okay. But it doesn’t. So the result is that the movie is, in cinematic terms, saying that a young teen should let go of his 4 months dead mother… that this is growth.

Well, fuck that. (The film, btw, is obnoxiously filled with “shits” and the now requisite single “fuck” that is allowed in a PG-13.) “Four months with a dead mom, now get over it!” Bad.

Worse, the boy’s first love is also without her mother. But it’s barely eluded to, even as she falls in with a boy with a recently dead mother. It’s as though they were trying to avoid anything that might distract the audience from the nostalgic fun. This is powerful stuff for kids growing up… missing parents… and they use it here like it’s… well… a gag in the midst of an action movie… as emotionally weighty as Cindy Crawford and whatever Baldwin that was deciding to get naked in a train while being tracked by heavily armed mercenaries.

Yet… I am not really ANGRY about it because the film never bothers to connect with this emotionally to such a degree that the betrayal of that emotion is truly offensive. (see: Anthony “I’m 6 feet tall on the inside” Weiner and the non-sex sex scandal)

But that’s the big limitation on the film… why it isn’t within a country mile of the weakest of Spielberg’s efforts. I may have felt like the mother/child/robot relationship in AI was manipulative or severe or even unreal… but I FELT it. Some people saw the sex in Munich as too intense, too needy… but you FELT it, even if you didn’t think it was the right choice. (I beg to differ.) Here, they pelt you with every trick in the Tear Jerker’s Handbook and somehow, there is nothing to feel but nostalgia for disco and flare jeans and tube tops (aside from Ms. Fanning, who feels like the human in the wax museum).

And don’t even get me started on the movie having two black characters with speaking roles, one who kills the other. And my biggest laugh… after the bad black man is eaten (or whatever that is) by the six-legged freak, the kids not only return to the scene of the near-death events for no apparent reason, but the lead kid goes and retrieves his necklace out of the dead guy’s pocket without any oddness to searching a dead man’s pocket or any trace of this guy having been in the monster’s gullet. Oy!

Of course, perhaps the worst offense is that the Super 8 footage means NOTHING in the plot. Not a thing. I decided that the creature was “Super 8,” but I am pretty sure it was just 6 limbs. Sigh.

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END OF SPOILERS

The movie wants to be “Goonies Go Cloverfield” on some level, but another problem is that aside from Elle Fanning, none of these kids, who do a nice job, are terribly memorable. I felt pain for the kid playing Tanner (with firecrackers) from the Bad News Bears. He just didn’t have that same kind of charisma. Riley Griffiths, who plays The Filmmmaker here, is probably the most interesting of the boys, but is stuck – like so much of the film – between playing a fascinatingly prepossessed young man who is very serious about his filmmaking and Chunk from The Goonies.

Upon seeing Glynn Turman, I thought we might see a parade of former 70s stars, all 30+ years older now, turning up. Nope. Mostly we get Ron Eldard in a bad hairstyle, doing a stereotypical angry drunk guy who leaves garbage on his lawn. We get Noah Emmerich as buttoned up as possible. We get throwaway cameos from Dan Castellaneta and Michael Hitchcock.

The entire movie is about milking the nostalgia for a simpler time and yet, when it comes to a train wreck, it is the CG car wreck extravaganza that might have been lifted whole from a Transformers film (where it would make sense, tonally). It’s even referred to in dialogue in a way that suggests that the filmmakers knew how unreal it was.

And someone needs to tell J.J., who they all love, that blue light flares with no source are not a directorial signature that signal him as anything other than desperate for a signature. Abrams will not be a quality film director until he frees himself of this nonsense, not only because it takes audiences out of the movie, but because it is symbolic of his mind being elsewhere, not 100% about making the movie work.

As I watched the third act, I found myself playing the, “What if this character/idea wasn’t in the film?” game. And I thought, this could have been a small, enormously fun, light, entertaining piece… if they just cut 60% of the oh-so-familiar, easy-to-love-but-utterly-irrelevant stuff out.

E.T. meets The Goonies meets Son of Rambo would have been more than enough. But instead, we also get the Cloverfield and the Close Encounters and Transformers and Boogie Nights and That 70s Show and War of the Worlds and Eight Legged Freaks and Adventureland and The Bad News Bears, etc, etc, etc, etc…

I don’t know that anyone is going to be really upset at having spent $10 to see this film. I would bet that a lot of people are going to remember moments of pleasure and laughs… and still leave the theater feeling oddly disappointed.

I was so hopeful.

JJ Abrams has had remarkable success for a guy who isn’t really a film director. He’s a great TV mind. He is, generally, great with characters. And he has the good taste to hire people who make very pretty pictures and offer great (loud) sound and music. But he just doesn’t seem to, as of this moment, have the movie mindset. The Super 8 series, with 20 hours to develop all of the relationships, the loss some characters suffer, and the Event of this film around Hour 12, would probably have been great.

But the film is beautiful sound and beautiful fury frustratingly signifying almost nothing.