Abrams has proved to be a talented cameraman. I don't mean this in a condescending manner, at least not entirely. But that's all there is with him, shape and contour. He's yet to situate himself within a worldview - so he borrows from where it is convenient to fit into. Here it's Spielberg - his world of wondrous discovery, magical escapade into comfortable menace, but where everything is wistfully made right again.
So you probably know by now how this is a pastiche built from other stuff; Close Encounters, The Host, The Goonies. The point-of-view is from the children (who are, perhaps, the only characters worth watching), the monster stalking the perimeters. The military is the faceless inhuman machine of cruel intentions.
What Abrams does is perfectly in tune with post-modernist ideas. But whereas the Coens appropriate raw essentials and even whole chunks of preconceived world but build from them their own notion of a universe, Abrams is merely an itinerant garbage collector.
It's all so derivative, so uniformly processed, it makes me wonder why anyone would take time out of their lives to make it - assuming one has creative aspirations about the art. Is Close Encounters really that old? So, like the myth of Prometheus; some artists risk to steal the fire that will renew our lives, a dangerous fire, others merely spend their time bound in the confines of earlier discovery.
