I think it's unfortunate when people label something as having logical issues. People did this a lot with the Battlestar Galactica finale. "What? So the answer is.. god?? Angels?? WTF?" . When it seemed quite plain to me that aliens with a non-interference morality would have acted the same way. Plot holes, or logical flaws, are only an issue if they detract from the internal logic of the film. Usually, however, they are more a sign of the viewer's lack of imagination.

Okay, so here are some of the logic issues re Super 8 I have run across:

* The kids just happen to be shooting their film at the train station when the train from the base just happens to be going by at the same exact time the teacher just happens to drive onto the tracks creating the huge accident. [This is more of a possible coincidence issue].

* The teacher at the kids' school just happens to be the guy who knew the alien from research years ago. [Again more of a coincidence issue].

* How does the teacher possibly survive that accident?

* If the alien is able to break out of the train after the accident, why doesn't it escape before?

* Where does all the dirt go from the huge hole in the ground the alien dug?

* When Alice (Elle Fanning) is racing away on her bike from her father and her father crashes his car, the alien just so happens to be around to snatch Alice. [Again more of coincidence thing].

* The alien, who has been capturing human victims in order to feed on them, is suddenly persuaded to allow Joe to live when Joe delivers the line, "Bad things happen... but you can keep living."

* It just so happens that Joe reunites with his father and Alice reunites with her father at the precise moment the alien finishes building its spaceship and leaves to go find its 'family.' [Again coincidence factor, not logic].

If you have other logic or coincidence issues or have heard of others, please post them here. I'd like to have a go at them in another GITS post.

Regarding the alien suddenly being persuaded to allow Joe to live: It was established earlier (perfunctorily, but just the same) that the alien communicated telepathically when it touched someone - hence the science teacher's empathy for the alien. I thought Joe touched the alien and the alien felt the overlap in his and Joe's situations.

Scott, regarding coincidences, do you not feel that synchronicity is an acceptable story-telling tool? It's embedded deep in the teachings of Jung.

Most of the coincidences didn't bother me. But my girlfriend and I did both turn and look at each other when Joe mysteriously knew exactly where to go when he ran off to look for Alice. Maybe I just missed something here, but how did he know that particular garage would be the entrance to the alien's lair?

Scriptnotes,

When Joe was in the cemetery after the fight with his Dad, he hears strange noises coming from the building on the cemetery grounds. He also sees dirt being flung against the windows. When he learns that the creature was subterranean, he puts two and two together and figures that the building in the cemetery was where the creature was.

My only issue came later in the film where Joe and his friend use a rope to lower themselves into the cavern. Where did that Rope come from?

Biggest complaint my friends had was that the train accident evidently violated the laws of physics (a head-on collison with a truck shouldn't have caused that much damage, especially since the truck didn't seem to have that much momentum behind it). I assumed that the alien and/or alien's cubes influenced things somehow, though my rationale for that is a little shaky. The kids do say that that kind of crash is "very rare," so maybe that was the excuse.

Also, why on earth were the soldiers moving the alien in the first place? And why on an apparently unmanned train?

I thought that the plan to shoot the Super 8 film at the train station was to take advantage of the train schedule. I thought the filmmaker kid checked his watch and then hurried the production along to get the timing right. But it seemed like the filmmaker kid was the only one aware of the train...like he didn't let anyone know that that was his objective.

That none of the kids got hurt during the accident was a bit too convenient.

I did think that the truck's driver being the school science teacher was far too coincidental and not set up at all as it should have been.

The magnetic scene was also stretching believability and logic. It could pull the locket from Joe's pocket but not tug at their belt buckles?

@K: Your question about synchronicity is a good one. Coincidence is very tricky in movies. It's worth a GITS post. I'll try to get to that in the next several days.

That said, there is one adage in Hollywood I know - and have noted on the blog - about coincidences and that is this: You are only allowed one per script. Any more than that smacks of writer's convenience (i.e., a writer forcing events to happen to ease their way their way through the plot as opposed to events transpiring naturally within the confines of the story universe and its internal time clock, action/reaction, physics, etc).

My logic problem wasn't exactly with the movie itself: Everyone told me to see this movie in defense of "original" summer movies. Sure, it wasn't based on a pre-existing work, but it felt like the logline should have been, "The Goonies take on the Cloverfield monster, but it's OK, because he's E.T."

I went it really wanting to like it, but it felt like a stale re-hash. Which is odd, because Abrams breathed so much life into Star Trek and Mission Impossible movies.

First,i enjoyed the movie very much,it had the quality of magic nurtured in the early speilberg,and of course, all sci fi abuse logic,but what i felt questionable is why such a powerful creature who seems perfectly adapted to a underground living would develop technology to the point of space exploration.We as a species used our early technology to adapt.The parts of the alien did nt amount to a coherent sum,again sci fi is a candy store,it has to sell sugar(sorry for the spelling,i m french)

Yeah, I can totally forgive the first coincidence of the kids being in the right place at the right time - but the second one that the teacher at their school just happens to be connected to the alien experiment is where things get too convenient for me.

What bugged me was stuff like the point I noted in my post here last week - the inconsistency in the monster's actions:

"In one scene, the creature smashes up a gas station and a police car with all the care of a toddler toppling his building blocks. Then, in another scene, we're shown that all the engines on a used car lot were taken right out of their automobiles - with no damage to the shell of the car at all.

Yeah, suddenly the violent, thrashing monster decided to gingerly remove engines from the cars and then carefully closed the hood to make his crime less obvious."

This inspired a friend to dash off an accompanying sketch

I also kind of take issue with how we're supposed to feel towards the creature. Sure it was mistreated by its captors, but it kills two completely innocent people on screen. This isn't a case like the Horta in the Star Trek episode Devil in the Dark, where the creature was actually defending its eggs from miners - this is straight-up murder.

So when the alien ship starts assembling, should we really be rooting for the beast, or should we be shouting at the military "Drop him!"

But then, I don't know if that's a logic issue as you've defined it here.

I don't mind the coincidences in the story, if you sit down with any movie you can go nuts pointing out coincidences.

"Oh, she just happened to witness the crime. What a coincidence!"

My problems are more like this: After the train crash why did the military arrive on foot? Were they just jogging through this random small town on the train's cross country path?

- Why do they need to move the alien across country and on top of it... transport it on the exact same train as his cubes?

- The military collects all the cubes and puts them back in these specialized crates and they don't notices exactly 1 missing?

- The creature is brutal and unswerving to begin with and then very gently removes the engines from cars?

- So some reason during the suburban warfare, the soldiers say that they've lost control of their weapons... why? And if this is so, why hasn't the monster already controlled various weapons to escape?

- Beyond the convenience of the school science teacher being the same scientist in that facility... he has all his work in a trailer out back? The military hasn't come looking for him or noticed that he took a lot of research... including probably the only copy of those particular 8mm films of the monster?

- Why would the sheriff go and arrest Elle's father for staying home drunk? Wouldn't he go to jail for wrongful imprisonment? Why isn't he hung up on the actual person who caused his wife's death? Or was it actually her fault that caused the accident?

- If the monster does 'share' feelings with each of the people it touches, why didn't it feel remorse of all the people he's captured or even just for Elle? She couldn't have possibly wanted to cause the monster harm and she has a sad story just like Joe...

- Joe was able to hold onto his locket when the magnet water tower was picking up cars and yanking kitchen stoves through glass windows?

- The monster was pulling electrical cables down for his device but the town seemed to still get sufficient power.

- After getting all these cubes together, the military evacuates the town and goes after the monster... but the trucks with the cubes goes back into the town?

- This military is going crazy barging in whereever but they can't seem to locate a singular vehicle from that tire track? They don't investigate probably the only film store that can develop 8mm film after finding 8mm film at the crime scene...

- I'm assuming the monster was building a super electromagnet out of the water tower to get his cubes organized... but if the military already collected them all why were they behind held at the location? Why weren't they sent to their original destination like they were on the train?

I think the main issue with the movie is not cohesively intertwining the two stories and taking the adventure and mystery of the movie and making that the sheriff's story... It should have been the kids exploring and putting the pieces together.

JJ also needs to expand upon his Mystery Box obsession. He's way more interested in creating mysteries than resolving them. Theoretically, JJ is missing out on suspense because he's always withholding information. The audience is never given more information than the characters.

I feel like the reactions on Super 8 are similar to the LOST finale. Half the people wanted a satisfying ending that tied up all the loose threads to the mysteries and the other half just wanted to have a satisfying goodbye to the characters. With this movie, there's the crowd that dislikes it because it never came together in a satisfying way... and then there's the people that loved it because of the kid's story with making the movie... If you literally removed the whole monster story, the kids making the film story isn't hindered at all and in fact, I would argue would be a better film.

The kids filming at the train station coincidence didn't bother me. I thought his plan was to hopefully film at a time when a train was coming. I mean they did plan to film at midnight which may be the times when trains roll on by.

It did bother me that the teacher survived a head on collision though. That big of a crash caused a huge amount of damage and the guy has the strength to lift up a gun.

One thing I noticed was when the military happened to catch the kids at the school. I mean didn't they search the school before the kids got there? They searched the teacher's house.
Did I miss something and the military was following them? If a guard happened to be stationed at the school and sees the kids break in, then I would say yeah, ok they got caught, but then the driver would have gotten caught too, so something happened to make the military to look there again.

Plot-holes and questions are the only thing that might be wrong with Super 8.

That being said, I think you have to throw them out.

Coincidences and plausibility are to MUCH extent, irrelevant for a summer-fun sci-fi kid-driven action/adventure/comedy.
The parallels to this and Goonies are well and deserved, and I doubt anyone really cared that Data was saved mid-fall by a belt-spring-chatter-teeth gizmo. You just gotta roll with it sometimes.

So the problem must be with the disparity between the film and our expectations. Since they are mysterious about things, we expect the answers to be rock solid. Since it was handled broad and earnestly (for the most part?) we expect things to be realistic (within the set universe) and consistent.

Do we hold JJ Abrams to a different standard? Did the film cheat from what we were lead to expect? Did it expect us to go along with too much fantasy? Did it sacrifice too much realism for spectacle?

I was a little bothered by a few things, (the teacher's truck not being disintegrated as previously thought, the readiness to go on a suicidal rescue mission on a whim) but ultimately was able to shrug them off. In the end, it was a fun ride.

Coincidences can be ordinary ("I saw a red car right after reading Lenin!") or extraordinary (This town, this teacher, these kids!). The first kind are constant throughout every story, allowing it to progress; the latter are the necessary conditions to allow the story to even happen. (If the teacher lived in a different town, the monster movie would have happened there, though the kids story would still be here.)

That said, things like the teacher's survival (the most unlikely thing for me) are NOT coincidences; they are story facts, things that allow other story points to continue. But if that fact were different, the writer could still make a later point, just via a different means.

Why is the monster so violent and brutish and yet so intelligent? Because that what the worst of humanity's future might become. (Nazi's started down this path; the beast here is just utterly non-human, from a non-human society where things didn't go a "Start Trek" kind of way.)

Bottom like for me is this: this movie is really just the story of some kids making a movie (the A story), while a monster gets loose in the background and the military rounds it up (the B story). Intersections abound, but if the teacher lived fifty miles further down the road, I'd still love to see the kids movie, to watch them discover the girl can really act, to see who she falls for and how his friends really feel about that, and to resolve how fireworks will matter in the end.

Loved the movie. Perfect? Hardly. Entertaining? Wonderfully.

The logical problem I see is that the monster plot and the kids Super 8 movie/love plot seemed like two different movies. Or three, once you add in the parents inability to come to terms with a past tragedy. In addition, regarding the monster, there is little if any setup making the monster's existence believable or credible which allowed me to suspend disbelief. The writers didn't prepare us for their story world, in the first place. And they fractured the story world into unrelated parts.

And I really wanted to like this movie...

A large plot hole was how easily the kids and the stoner got his car out of the military base after the evacuation. One minute, they're sneaking through the car lot so as not to be seen, and we see that they're behind a chain-link fence with guards, then there's a "sleight of hand cut" and they're on the road, free as can be. This is a problem because it undercuts the gravity of the military evacuating the town and rounding them up. At first the evacuation seems like a significant development in the film and a serious obstacle, then they just breezily overcome it, so it's not really an obstacle at all.

I'll have to add more later, but one of the biggest holes to me was why was the military randomly shooting up the town and why we're they caught in their own crossfire?

Scott, I shall try to put reason behind some of these "logic" problems you are having with super 8.

-The kids were shooting at the train station because it was abandoned and made for good "production value". The train coming by at that moment is coincidence, but it's coincidence means something. If you've never made short films you don't know the feeling. There are always times when I get to a location, and something at that location inspires me to alter the way i'm going to shoot something. I felt that was what Abrams was trying to display with the train coming by at that moment.

-" How does the teacher possibly survive that accident?" How could anybody possibly survive anything?

-The alien would logically have been put to sleep before they tried to move it. When the crash happened it woke up.

-The alien ate the dirt, and then shat it out somewhere else. Or he just displaced it throughout the huge tunnel system he created. You pick.

-It was hinted at throughout the entire film that the creature hadn't always hated humans. He was forced to hate them by the government who wouldn't let him go home. When he touched the kid he felt something special. He felt a connection as if him and this kid weren't so different.

-All of your comments on coincidence are OK to point out, but coincidence occurs on a regular basis in reality, so in avoiding coincidence during a story aren't you removing some reality from it?

Just a thought.

oh and Tom,

If you would have actually watched the movie you would have heard them say that their weapons were randomly misfiring. It is clear that the creature, who has psychic and magnetic powers, or the stuff he is doing underground is causing this to happen.

P.S. Don't mean to be too harsh, I just don't like it when people miss something in a movie, and then attribute their distaste for the film to an aspect they clearly missed.

@cerg: Actually I didn't say one way or the other whether I had an issue with the logic 'problems' noted in comments. I'm withholding that information until I pull together the post I referenced.

I'm simply acknowledging what a lot of readers have emailed me about, my friends in the business and I have discussed, or stray things I've seen in the press.

For the record, I thought Super 8 was a strong piece of entertainment. And my 10 year old son said it's perhaps his favorite movie.

While I do see a few logic issues in Super 8, I feel it's a tad unfair to single it out as a massive heap of convenient coincidence. All films have this problem. In Kubrick's Lolita, Clare Quilty just so happens to be staying at the same hotel as Humbert and Lolita OR in A Street Car Named Desire it takes Harold almost the whole film before he realizes Blanche is older than what she says she is...

Does Super 8 have a few more of these questionable areas? Sure. But I don’t feel there is a film made that can claim total innocence.

My main issue with the film is the monster. It tried to be sympathic at the same time a scary killing machine.

With everyone wanting (or needing, rather) everything spelled out for them, it's a wonder that anyone watches anything anymore. They certainly don't enjoy it.

1. The main action of movie takes place in early April, 1979 (Walter Cronkite references Three Mile Island on the TV). Rubik's Cubes, to which the white, alien cubes are compared, were not introduced into US markets until 1980. For all the attention given to creating an authentic 1979 feel, this anachronism was pretty disappointing.

2. Why was the emerging alien spacecraft selectively magnetic? Some airmen's guns are ripped away at full force, some remain easily in others' hands. The little pyro's braces stay effortlessly in his goofy mouth, but the protagonist's locket is gently lifted away. What's up with that?

the one thing i kinda of kept going over and over after i seen the movie was this: the monster/alien seemed to easily destroy any and every military person & civilian in his path the entire movie. after he breaks loose of his train car prison he spends the whole movie building this "machine" to get the pieces of his ship back. BUT, when he does originally break loose, all the pieces of his ship are scattered everywhere. Instead of just ripping those GI's to bits, getting his spaceship pieces and getting the hell out of there, he decides to run away. i understand that there wouldnt really have been a movie if that had happened, but it doesnt make sense that it didnt.

Suspend disbelief when you see Sci Fi summer blockbusters and you guys will probably get laid more.
Fun movie- logical fallacies and all. Just be glad a fresh film can be written with no source material.

Simply put, I think they spent much more time on the visual aspect than on flushing out story problems.

The most basic example: the monster is described as "subterranean", yet flies away at the end.