Director: J.J. Abrams
Cast: Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Hell, on some level I kind of lived it. No, my town wasn’t mysteriously taken over by a strange creature, unless you count the strange penguin statues that cropped up one day in 2002 and never completely left. It’s more that I spent some time while I was growing up screaming “production value” at my friends while we all tried with intermittent success to not get hit by oncoming trains.
Did I Like It: It’s sort of painful to say that this is the best movie J.J. Abrams has ever (and may yet ever, the way things are going) directed. Star Trek (2009), Mission: Impossible III (2006), and Star Wars – Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) are all enjoyable romps, and I don’t want to entirely discount them, but this one reaches for actual characters, as opposed to trying to renew interest in television series that once starred Leonard Nimoy. Also, this has no discernable Beastie Boys in it, although I suppose at that point they would have to be called The Young Aborigines at the point in time that the film is set.
Whenever I see this film (it’s on semi-regular rotation at our house) I can’t help but feel nostalgic for that time when the most important thing in the world was making stuff with my friends. I was Charles Kaznyk (Griffiths) growing up, with all of the warts that entailed. The rest of the kids aren’t perfect analogues for the people I knew way-back-when, but they are imminently real and recognizable. There are too few films that depict kids in a way that feels anything like the childhood I enjoyed, and that alone is enough to make the film imminently enjoyable.
Some complain about the ending, and aside from a bit too much similarity in tone to the end of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), I’m fine with it.
Oh, on that note, there is also a monster in the movie, apparently. That seems sort of secondary to the proceedings, and that may be the distillation of its flaws. I am far less interested in this movie when Cooper the monster is featured, but I suppose that’s okay. They don’t give this kind of money to movies about weird kids with monster makeup. Production value, am I right?