THE ENDING OF SUPER 8 MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL!

By Barry Dutter

The movie SUPER 8 bears remarkable similarities to E.T. Both movies are about an alien who just wants to go home. (I half-expected to hear Neil Dimaond singing "Turn on your heart light...")

The big difference is that the alien in ET is friendly and lovable, but the alien in SUPER 8 is sometimes good, sometimes evil, depending on his mood.

SUPER 8 presents its monster as an underdog. He’s been imprisoned for decades by the US government, and all he wants to do is rebuild his spaceship and get the heck off of Earth. At the beginning of the film, a scientist sets the alien free by crashing his truck into the train that is carrying it (The scientist's actions presumably kill all the people who were on board the train at the time, but this is kind of glossed over in the name of science.)

At this point, the alien begins a several day terror spree. He goes into hiding, coming out only at night to 1) kidnap random people and 2) steal car engines and other metal objects. We later find out he is stealing the car engines so he can acquire enough metallic objects to build his own makeshift space ship.

And he is kidnapping the people because… why exactly? I’m not sure. The film never makes that clear. In one scene, the alien is shown killing and eating a human. In another scene, the alien is shown being talked out of killing a young boy by the boy’s persuasive speech.

So I guess the alien is evil if it finds you threatening, but if you are friendly to it and talk to it in a calm voice, it will let you go free. That makes some kind of sense, but it still doesn’t explain why the alien was kidnapping random people in the first place.

What did it hope to gain by doing so? Snacks for the long ride home?

Just like in ET, the alien finds the means to escape just as the army is closing in. In SUPER 8, the alien uses its telekinetic powers to summon all the metal in the area to build his spaceship and get away.

But if the alien has the power to do this, why didn’t it do this on the night of the train crash? Surely there was enough metal in the train wreck to provide the alien with enough metal to build its ship.

I enjoyed SUPER 8 overall, until the ending, which didn’t make any sense to me. It reminded me of the end of THE WIZARD OF OZ. Like Dorothy in that movie, the alien apparently had the power to go home all along. It chose not to, because doing so would have ended the movie an hour earlier.

I’ve heard JJ Abrams admit in interviews that he is not that great of a writer. I have to agree with him. As a director, he’s an excellent imitator of young Stephen Spielberg. As a writer, he has yet to impress me.

As my brother pointed out, SUPER 8 is basically ET meets CLOVERFIELD. And it's a bit soon for Abrams to be doing homages to his own movies.