Super 8

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With the third Mission: Impossible and his stellar Star Trek reboot, J.J. Abrams proved to be extremely gifted at making J.J. Abrams movies. Super 8, however, shows that he's not so good at making Steven Spielberg films.

A Frankenstein's monster of movie memories, Super 8 delivers a predictable kids-and-creature feature that's genetically engineered by Abrams to recall a handful of films you loved growing up -- most of which bore executive producer Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment logo. But in a rare case of reverse nostalgia, the incessant nods Abrams makes to other beloved movies prevent you from ever falling in love with Super 8 on its own.

In a nondescript Ohio town, a family tragedy leaves quietly artistic Joe (Joel Courtney) and his stoic father, Jackson (Kyle Chandler), on opposite sides of an emotional chasm. Dad disapproves of Joe's friends; six middle-schoolers on break for the summer who commit to filming portly Charles's (Riley Griffiths) homegrown zombie movie. But while recording one night near the town's train stop, a pick-up truck driven by the middle school's science teacher purposefully rams a speeding train, causing a massive pile up that unleashes the locomotive's alien cargo.

Super 8 suggests that Abrams wanted a holy marriage of E.T. and Cloverfield. But the sentimental coming-of-age drama embodied by the Super 8 kids doesn't mesh with the suspenseful monster thriller. The director appears to have mashed them together and painted over the jagged seams with nostalgia -- the duct tape of Hollywood.

Which is a shame because Abrams's kid actors actually are great. They channel the unforced chemistry of small-town friends as they trade gentle insults over a plate of French fries or find their unique role in Charles's amateur film. Griffiths has the broad-shouldered optimism of an indie filmmaker (you can tell he was coached by both Abrams and Spielberg). And Courtney finds a paler shade of the childhood awe Henry Thomas unleashed in E.T. Despite his mastery of monster movie makeup, Joe can't cover his innocent crush on Alice (Elle Fanning, immensely talented), the ensemble's only female and the requisite cool beauty from the wrong side of the tracks. You can almost hear Troy bellowing, "Andy, you Goonie!" the minute Fanning's blonde tomboy joins this close-knit group off goofballs, but there we go, referencing older movies from which Super 8 meticulously borrows.

The Spielberg influence is omnipresent. Abrams employs Jaws' most effective parlor trick by keeping his space creature hidden from view for as long as possible. The aliens-among-us motif reeks of E.T. and Close Encounters. Abrams even dips into War of the Worlds and Saving Private Ryan in an unnecessarily explosive third act that ramps up the military's involvement (to the detriment of the story).

Abrams's influences don't end with Amblin. Super 8 calls to mind The Monster Squad and The Goonies (yet lacks the anarchic humor of both), relies on the found-footage gimmick of The Blair Witch Project, and taps the melancholic vein running through Rob Reiner's Stand By Me, an excellent adaptation of Stephen King's short story The Body.

Maybe Super 8 will be Stand By Me (or Monster Squad, or Goonies) for the generation that isn't intimately connected to those films, the budding film geeks who don't know Amblin fromAvatar. Because for those of us weaned on early Spielberg (and the genre exercises he influenced), Super 8 is overly predictable and familiar to the point that it lacks in surprise. Like a top-notch cover band, it seamlessly reproduces a tune you loved as a kid by hitting all the right notes and strumming most of the rhythms without adding much in the way of improvisation.