I was going to say that I spent the first half hour of Super 8 wondering if I had watched it before, but the reality is, I spent the whole film thinking this. I hadn’t, but a combination of wilful appropriation of about a million genre clichés and blatantly obvious plot lines made it rather seem like I had. It is not a terrible thing, because it’s a very well made film, and clichés are clichés for a reason (they work) but it rather takes you out of the movie when you can’t help but notice that Speilbergs standard mode of transport for young people is the BMX. Speilbergo is some sort of executive producer on the film, but I think what I think the credit should have said is ‘young person transport organisation’. This probably wouldn’t have had the same sort of pulling power on the cover of the DVD, but a well known name is well known name in the marketing game.

What the film is though, is a film about film making, which I think speaks to the fact that the people making it are so completely detached from the real world that they no longer have any frame of reference that is not celluloid based. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the future it becomes apparent that the dialogue for Super 8 was mashed up from a couple of hundred classic movies, just a line or two from each so it’s not incredibly noticeable, but I would not have been at all surprised if someone had come out with a ‘they drew first blood’ or ‘you lookin at me?’ at any point. Again, not a bad film, the master film makers involved can’t help but call on years of experience to get you emotionally invested, its just pretending you don’t notice the undercurrent of every other film you have watched that is the difficult part.