There's nothing quite like the warm and fuzzy feeling you can get with nostalgia. Hanging out with friends, reminiscing about how Space Dust felt on your tongue, and arguing about whether Swap Shop or Tiswas was the best. One thing you could always agree on is they don't make films like they used to.

Someone who would probably agree is director J.J.Abrams, whose latest project takes a good old stroll down memory lane.

It may be the start of the summer hols for a bunch of kids in Lillian, Ohio, but it's also a period in their lives that sees the 1970s drawing to a close. Joe (Joel Courtney) wants to spend the summer helping out Charles (Riley Griffiths) and the rest of his friends with a short film they're all making, which features the dead coming back to life.

So with their Super 8 camera in hand, they head off to a remote railway station to film one of the scenes. What makes it all the more exciting is that THE Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) has agreed to act in the film.

The station scene goes really well, except for a small matter of a truck driving into the on-coming path of a speeding train, causing one almighty crash. Thankfully Joe and the gang escape unharmed – just.

As it turns out, the train crash is only the first of many strange occurrences to take place in little ole Lillian. Not only do all the dogs seem to run out of town, but there's weird power outages happening all the time. To make things even more curious, the army turn up and take an extreme interest in what's going on. Joe and his pals have no idea what that is, but they're about to find out.

Apparently this is the missing sex scene from ET. He makes quite a mess for such a tiny alien.

After watching Super 8, you could be forgiven if you got the main credits round the wrong way: it feels like the kind of thing that its producer Steven Spielberg would have directed, with J.J possibly producing. The real tell-tale sign that this is not the case is the fact that Abrams has created an impressive homage featuring a veritable smorgasbord of Spielberg including elements of Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T and The Goonies, which Spielberg exec produced.

The main problem in doing this is that Abrams has thrown so much into it, the film isn't exactly sure of what it's supposed to be. For instance, apart from the impressive train sequence, very little else happens in the first half of the film. He sets up a whole bunch of relationship stuff; mostly between the boys themselves, but also Joe's relationship with his father (Kyle Chandler) and the budding friendship with Alice. It's all very touching, but has no pace about it all.

There wouldn't be anything wrong with that if the second half was a rip-roaring ride, but it isn't. The creature in the film feels like a red herring, much like the smoke monster from Abram's Lost was, making all-too-teasingly-brief appearances; and when it does finally rear its head, it's almost apologetic, as if it's intruding in someone else's film. You half expect it to ask for a quarter so it can make a quick phone call home.

So what the film really lacks is focus. It has bags of personality and it's extremely likeable, but just isn't cohesive enough. If it wanted to be a coming of age flick like Stand by Me, then it should have been just that, but by throwing a monster loose into the mix, it becomes an altogether more confused beast.

Possibly in going out of their way to create more than just an over-the-top CGI-fest like Transformers, Abrams and Spielberg have possibly gone too far the other way in pushing the character's stories and relationships.

It had the potential to be a really outstanding film – especially with the talent on board – and although it's entertaining in patches, the film's biggest failure, sadly, is that it promises far more than it actually delivers.

It just goes to prove that nostalgia can be severely overrated.