10 Wildly Overpraised Movies
9. Super 8
What The Critics Said: “The year’s most thrilling, FEELING mainstream movie.” (Time)
Small world dept: J.J. Abrams first movie job was on Don Dohler’s Nightbeast (1982), a threadbare sci-fi movie (shot mostly in the director’s back yard) about an alien on the loose in a small town.
Three decades later, armed with a $50 million budget, Abrams returned to that world with Super 8, a sort of coming of age story mixed with heavy doses of It Came From Outer Space. Set in 1979, there’s nostalgia aplenty as a group of friends investigate a train crash they witnessed and slowly come to realize there’s more to the incident than meets the eye.
Co-produced by Steven Spielberg, Super 8 wants to rub shoulders with the likes of Gremlins and Back To The Future but the poor pacing and undernourished story mean it’s not in the same league. If you really want to see this sort of thing pulled off, you’re far better off going back and watching It Came From Outer Space.