Super 8 - Not Everyone Is Bad!

(2011) ★★★☆☆

Lest you don’t know, it’s not a mockumentary that J.J. Abrams is famous for (remember 2008’s Cloverfield gave you hell?). It’s not a child’s play though it centers on a bunch of kids. It seems to be about governmental conspiracy or military secrets or stuff but it’s not quite about that. It reminds you of Steven Spielberg’s ET (1982) naturally, whether you like it or not. As you might’ve guessed, it’s about friendship and humanity.

Aliens in films are either friendly or hostile. In Super 8, they’re both. It opens with kids trying to shoot a zombie film but they’re interrupted by a violent railway accident caused by a scientist desperate to want to stop things from getting worse. Things, nonetheless, inevitably go wild afterwards, like people and animals getting killed without a reason or disappearing without a trace. To some extent, it seems like a monster movie, a lousy one since its special effects are by no means good. Only if you can stay seated long enough, you’ll somehow be impressed by the way it ends and the message behind it all.

‘Not everyone is bad, you can still live’, is the last and only thing that one of the kids says to one of the monsters right before they finally decide to rebuild their spacecraft and leave the Earth (they could’ve done it long time ago in fact because they’re far more technologically intelligent than us, but they didn’t. Don’t know why!). Truth is, there’re bad guys as long as there’re good. Otherwise, we can’t tell the good from the bad. We get to understand our world via comparisons and distinctions. That’s why we ill-treat them just to get what we want. That’s why they hate us and we’re afraid of them. That’s why I don’t think we’re ready enough to deal with any other civilizations out there. We’re way too ignorant and selfish!