Re: Super **** Grading and Discussion Thread
I was surprised that I really didn't care for it. The child actors did a good job but their characters as written were really annoying, especially since they seemed to be always bickering amongst each other. The few scenes the male lead had with the female lead were good, particularly when she confesses to him the full circumstances of his mother's death, but as a group they were hard to endure.
And then the alien story, wisely shrouded in secret for most of the movie (and the entire ad campaign), came to a disappointing conclusion too. I liked that it was difficult to get a good glimpse of the creature early on. It was when the children went into its lair and it came out front and center that things just fell apart. The movie seemed to want for us to feel sympathy for the thing, since the scientist character who freed it spent time telling us how it had suffered deplorable treatment at the hands of the military, and the primary military representative in the film was obviously a real asshole. But it's hard to sympathize with the alien when we find out that it has apparently been catching the townsfolk to eat them. And children at that.
As a result, the heavy-on-sentiment finale felt mostly just confusing. The effect of the ship being built was nice, but I didn't have any attachment to the beast itself, and by that point it had come to overshadow the human members of the cast... who I also didn't really care about, so I guess that wasn't a total loss either.
I also thought that the train crash was way overblown, to the point that none of the children should have been able to walk away from it. That they all did, with barely a scratch on them, sucked me out of the movie for a bit.
On the plus side, I like Kyle Chandler's character because he didn't bicker nearly as much as the rest of the characters, even if he was a terrible father. I also kind of liked seeing the kids' movie play during the end credits. Other than that... meh.
