It sounds like you're complaining about failure to suspend disbelief. Good films suspend disbelief while great ones actually make us believe. But sometimes you see something and it completely cracks the facade. In your case it was "too much" retro decor, probably like an older woman putting on too much makeup, not realizing that adding more and more lipstick, rouge, mascara and eyeliner will not turn a 50-year-old into an 18-year-old.

I want to throw out a Spielberg retro thing here. Super 8 was described as 'E.T. for the previous generation' on one site I browsed. That got me to thinking about it, so I watched it again and paused it a lot, trying to see how 1979 they made this movie. It's almost too 1979. It's enough background stuff to let you know they are putting too much background stuff in. Like where's waldo. Tim Burton did the same thing with Dark Shadows. In both movies I would spot something sitting on a shelf and I would focus on that and wonder if they found it in a thrift store or Spielberg's basement (or borrowed it from Flack's garage!) Instead of following the story.
A little background is OK but Joe's and Charles's bedrooms are just filled with that stuff. Just filled. I was that age in 1979 and I didn't have half of that stuff. Well, maybe a handful of 8 tracks and lots of Revell models, oh and I did listen to CBS Radio Mystery Theater from 11:07 PM to midnight during the summer, but all the other stuff was just not for me.
So because I live in my own AArdvark-fantasyland I can speak for every fifty year old when I say there's too much patently retro stuff thrown in Super 8 just for the sake of being retro.

Other than that it was pretty good.

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Yeah, it's like Comic Sans for movies.

It's a good thing I don't Google my subjects before shooting my mouth off here. There seems to be quite the hullaballoo about Abrams and lens flare.


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The man is obsessed with putting as much lens flare into his movies as possible. It used to be unavoidable cinematic noise but technology has made lens flare almost obsolete.
J.J. Abrams adds in so much lens flare it makes my eyes water. I first noticed excessive lens flare in the Star Trek reboot movies. Then last week I was watching Super 8 again and there it was in almost every scene. I guess it's art. I was at the point where I was looking at the lens flare and not watching the movie. Does this bother anyone but me? I don't mind a little bit here and there but it's too much. I bet he dumps a ton of lens flare in the new Star Wars movie.


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