So, the thing about Super 8 is that you’re not really allowed to talk about it. There are these kids making a movie in 1979, as you do when you are kids and have a video camera and a friend who wants to make movies and video games haven’t been invented yet. And while they are at the train station filming a scene, they accidentally witness a pretty huge train wreck. All of this is in the teaser trailer from like 18 months ago, right? Anyway, after the wreck, things get mysterious, and that’s all I’m going to say.

What I suppose I am allowed to talk about, though, is the reactions it has been getting. I’ve seen people say that it implies there used to be magic in the world, but you have to go back in time to get it because now things are way too mundane for a big adventure. I have a little bit of sympathy for this, I do. Because I’ve thought to myself that if I had been older in the ’70s, I might have been one of those people making a Chainsaw or an Evil Dead, so I’m already a little predisposed to see the ordinary, everyday magic of widened possibilities in that era moreso than in this one, where you have to be slick and polished to even get any word of mouth going. (That’s not true, of course, but most of what I’ve seen for which that wasn’t true was just terrible. And clearly it wasn’t always thus.) But when I watch this movie, I don’t see anyone saying the magic has gone out of the world. I see someone saying, this is what the world was like when I was a kid. Of course, I also notice the freedom of movement and association those kids have versus what I expect kids today to have, and I wonder. They’re in a small town, and maybe things haven’t changed all that much? But if things have changed, we’re the adults now, deciding what kids of that age are doing, and if the magic of 30 years ago is absent these days, there’s really only us to blame for it. But for now, I think it’s mostly a difference of place than time, and that the young writers and directors of today will still be finding magic in their own childhoods as we near the middle of the century.

On a more technical level, I’ve also heard people make comparisons to Goonies or Gremlins. While those are both fine movies, I didn’t tweak to either comparison myself, except at the most superficial level. No, what it immediately made me think of, and I never found myself disagreeing later, was a sweeping Stephen King small-town epic, along the lines of It or Under the Dome. Only, presented on the screen far better than any of those have ever been. You may be aware that’s pretty high praise.