The trickiest part about having a movie with a cast primarily with child actors is giving them believable lines. I like child actors to speak and behave like real children, and too many movies and TV shows give them lines that would be more fitting for a 50-year-old Shakespearean actor.
This is not a problem with Super 8. All of the Goonies-like young actors are very real and believable.
There is a monster in this movie, and he (she?) is extra-terrestrial, but it hardly matters. They could have made it a bear or a runaway circus elephant and it would have worked up until the final few minutes of the movie, when some heavy sci-fy was called for.
In fact, I was a bit disapointed at how inconsequential the monster was. Yes, it did provide a source for dramatic conflict and danger, but you never got to get acquainted with it. ET wanted to go home, but in the end, what made the movie so great (and makes us cry decades after we first saw it) was that we actually got to know (and love and somewhat understand) ET. In Super 8, we validated his parking spot and he just left.
I still liked the film, and it did remind me a lot of the Goonies.
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