Super 8: enjoyable, but JJ Abrams is no Spielberg

JJ Abrams has made no secret of how his latest feature, Super 8, is a homage to the man who inspires his film making: Steven Spielberg. He even got the great director to produce the film. But while Super 8 may successfully replicate the details and themes from ET and A Close Encounter, the critics agree that Abrams's creation is ultimately nothing more than Spielberg-lite.

Set in 1970's rural America, the plot centres on a train crash witnessed by a group of youngsters. Interrupted while filming a zombie film on their Super 8 camera, the kids quickly find themselves in a real-life horror as they realise something supernatural escaped the accident.

The US military soon turn up en masse - but it's up to the children to try to get to the bottom of the strange occurrences.

The world Abrams has created exhibits an attention to detail that "sits right on the line between uncanny and neurotic", according to A. O. Scott of the New York Times. "His 1979 is more like 1979 than the real 1979," Scott writes.

The film's depiction of wide-eyed youth draws similar praise from Roger Ebert. "Abrams treats early adolescence with tenderness and affection," he writes in the Chicago Sun-Times. "He uses his camera to accumulate emotion."

Part of this success is thanks to an impressive acting display from the film's teenage cast. The Guardian's Ben Child is impressed by the "wonderful bunch of sparkle-eyed misfits" which include lead actors Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning and Riley Griffiths. For Child, the performances avoid the "seriousness and plastic professionalism of the worst kind of child acting".

If only Abrams had kept his love of Spielberg under wraps, because it is the comparisons with the great sci-fi director where the film falls down for many critics. Peter Bradshaw says the idea of giving a Spielberg-obsessive the chance to make his own homage is strange, similar to "a lifelong burger fan entrusted with the chief managerial job at America's biggest branch of McDonald's".

The results, he believes, are "slightly disappointing... It's a boisterous genre piece with some of Spielberg's tricks but little of his storytelling pizazz and none of his intense heartfelt belief."

Empire's Ian Nathan has similar sentiments: "Super 8 never relinquishes its movieness. Where Spielberg mingled the extraordinary with a verifiable suburbia, Abrams works at one remove, locating the extraordinary in Spielbergia. The magic comes lovingly pre-packaged. Idealised."

Roger Ebert, however, is more comfortable with the Spielberg comparisons - up to a point. "During the first hour of Super 8, I was elated by how good it was. It was like seeing a lost early Spielberg classic.

"Then something started to slip... We want the human stories and the danger to mesh perfectly, and they seem to slip past one another."

Time Out's Tom Huddleston agrees. "The humour descends from snappy, believable banter to broad Goonies-style slapstick," he writes. "The emotional scenes plummet from the wonderfully terse, tight-lipped tragedy of the prologue to pure, manipulative schmaltz. Worst of all, the alien subplot is tiresome and derivative, leading to a laughable sub-ET finale."

By the end, the film has become victim to the predictability it appeared to defy. "The machinery of genre, so ingeniously kept to a low background hum for so long, comes roaring to life," according to A.O. Scott.

"The movie enacts its own loss of innocence. Super 8 turns out, the way many of us turn out, not to be so special after all." ·