I was so excited to watch Super 8 last year. I had followed the great marketing campaign and for a long time silently hoped that it would be a prequel to Cloverfield. But then I began preparing for my move to the United States. This meant long nights of cleaning up the old house, packing and sending all our stuff to our new destination. We had a few days of relatively quiet days between shipping our stuff and the actual move, and that’s when I decided to watch Super 8. That was not a good idea.
I was just way too tired to appreciate anything about Super 8, so I have to disregard that viewing and start over. Now, when watching Super 8 on Blu-ray, I could really appreciate what J.J. Abrams and his friends had achieved. And Super 8 is certainly something special. Recreating the sentiments from those old movies I grew up on—The Goonies, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind—was a great decision. Maybe not a decision that resonated with modern audiences, but nostalgia kicked into high gear for older audiences like me.
In Super 8 a group of friends set out to make a horror movie using their parents’ Super 8 cameras. While filming one of the pivotal scenes in their movie they are witness to one of the most horrifying train wrecks ever. A car crashes headlong into a freight train carrying a cargo that is unlike anything the kids have ever seen before. This is the beginning of an adventure that will go beyond their wildest dreams. It will try their friendships, bring about the best and worst in people and make them learn to judge a book by its content, not its cover. It is in a lot of ways a very similar tale Spielberg used to tell. Friendship is paramount, because it will help you through even the hardest times.
Super 8 shows that Abrams has lots of love and admiration for those old movies from the late ’70s and ’80s. Abrams grew up with the Super 8 format. He made home movies like the kids in the movie. He even managed to land a job cleaning up the old 8mm movies Spielberg shot when he was a kid. This job laid the foundation for what would become Super 8. A great tribute to a type of movie you don’t see often anymore. The only gripe I have with Abrams’ movie is that his monster once again looks like the monster in Cloverfield, just as it did in Star Trek. It is as if he has one model that he changes slightly to save money. This, on the other hand, didn’t diminish my appreciation of Super 8.
My Movie Year 2012 
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