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- Crowning Music of Awesome: But of course. Of particular note is the final two tracks, "Letting Go" and "Super 8 Suite".
- Ensemble Darkhorse: Carey, due to his rather vulgar nature and his love for explosions and fire.
- HSQ: Hits a massive spike during the train-crash scene.
- And again during the climax, when the military is bringing tanks and jeeps with machine guns to bear on the alien, with negligible effect.
- Its the Same So It Sucks:
- Hardly exactly the same, but it's really very similar to Cloverfield (produced by J.J. Abrams) in a lot of ways.
- Considering that the entire movie is a splicing together of Cloverfield, ET the Extraterrestrial, and The Goonies, this could be said of the entire story. Though, YMMV on whether that makes this film a nifty homage to the films of Abrams' childhood, or an awful checklist of cliches from better movies.
- Of course, the man behind 2/3s of those mentioned (and also Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws which this movie also homages) was the producer of this film (and not just executive, he was greatly involved in it).
- As a bit of a Take That in the audio commentary, JJ Abrams says when the Amblin logo appears "to the people who say we copied E.T., he actually appears in the movie."
- Memetic Mutation: "PRODUCTION VALUE!" seems to be floating around all over the place nowadays.
- Mint!
- The Scrappy: Charles, for his short-tempered, bratty, rude personality, his Prima Donna Director attitude while ordering around his own friends, and for only doing filmmaking just to impress Alice, with his later apology and letting Joe and her be together comes off as a case of too little, too late, not helped by Riley Griffith’s needlessly whiny, passive-aggressive performance. Martin, for being whiny and useless, along with him being the one who has the most over-emotional reactions to everything. Colonel Nelec, for being a one-note, boring General Ripper stereotype, that sent his soldiers to deliberately harm the imprisoned Cooper, kills Dr Woodward without any remorse, attempts to have Louis taken away for interrogation against his will, and in his lowest, scummiest moment, refuses to listen to Joe telling him to open the door, just so he can focus on fighting Cooper, which forces the kids to find a different way out through a broken window. Thankfully, Cooper tearing off his head into a bloody pulp is some richly-deserved karma.
- Squick: Seeing the flies that land all over Dr. Woodward's bloody wounds. Apparently, the flies were attracted to the karo syrup that was the main component of the fake blood.
- Visual Effects of Awesome:
- The train crash, absolutely.
- Other than the scenes toward the end where we see the alien in full [1], there doesn't look to be a lot of conspicuous CGI. Which is actually damn good work.