Children and Aliens

Aliens and monsters, the undead, paranormal and supernatural happenings, some of my favorite things about the movies. My dad schooled me in the essentials; I'm on a short list of names of people who saw both the 1951 Howard Hawk's The Thing and John Carpenter's 1982 remake before age 13.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind had me building Devil's Tower out of my mashed potatoes and Reese's Pieces will never be the same after E.T.
Last year, while practicing the Butt-In-Seat school of writing, I spent a good deal of time procrastinating by watching movie trailers. They were my two-minute breaks, of which I need quite a few of. It was on one of  these breaks that I first watched the trailer for the new JJ Abrams film Super 8. This film seemed to revel in ambiguity and I hoped  Mr. Abrams, who gained more of my faith with Star Trek, could produce another worthwhile piece of entertainment.
And he did, sort of. Super 8 follows middle schooler Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his friends Charles, (Riley Griffiths) Cary, (Ryan Lee) Martin, (Gabriel Basso) and Preston, (Zach Mills) while they, led by Charles, try to make a zombie movie. Joe has just lost his mother to an accident in the steel mill of this 1979 ohio town. His father, Jackson Lamb, (Kyle Chandler) doesn't really know how to raise a middle schooler.
Charles, brings in Alice Dainard ( Elle Fanning) to be a love interest for his protagonist. The group of children go to the local train station to film a scene. This scene within a scene is one Super 8's most mesmerizing. After they witness a train crash the film loses its originality and become little more than a string of hat-tips by Mr. Abrams to films like E.T. tied together with shadows and witty dialogue.
Super 8 never really pays off the way it seems to want to. It feels shallow and sometimes even soulless with the exception of a scene having to do with a locket and a giant magnet. There are no lasting images like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T, movies Super 8 tries too hard to emulate. Mr. Abrams   obviously admired these films as do I, and this is my favorite part of this film, the nods to classics and that the characters almost know they're in a movie, especially once while riding in a car, staring out the windshield at the audience and passing each other Redvines.