The first PG-13 movie I ever saw was Jurassic Park. I was 9 years old, and my two babysitters took me to see it on opening night: June 11, 1993.

I remember sitting in the fourth row of the theater, thinking I was probably the coolest kid in New York that night: a PG-13 movie (!), dinosaurs, with a 16-year-old girl on either side of me. I imagined my friends would hoist me onto their shoulders on Monday, make me a crown that said “Manliest third-grader ever,” and feed me Lunchables until I burst.

In retrospect, Jurassic Park is far from Steven Spielberg’s best work, but for a third-grader it was a pantheon of delights. It allowed my imagination to pitch and soar; everything was possible, including sapping velociraptor DNA from a chunk of amber. Jurassic Park unhooked something mentally for millions of children in 1993, just as E.T. had done 11 years earlier. And now, 18 years after Jurassic Park, Super 8 will do the same.

An obvious, yet not-damning homage to producer Spielberg, Super 8 allows the viewer the chance to look into the inner workings of director J.J. Abrams’ mind: a heartwarming dash of E.T. here, a terrifying bit of Jurassic Park there, bound together with a less-schmaltzy Goonies cast.

It’s two hours of nostalgia, shipping the viewer to a time when Grand Theft Auto wasn’t a 9-year-old’s moral compass, and fun meant spending every hour of daylight with your friends instead of just talking to them over Xbox. It made me want to call up my old North Park Elementary gang, run into the woods, and come back eight hours later covered in dirt and ticks. It made me think about my future children, it made me think about my past friends, and, most importantly, and made me wonder what happened to the boy who saw Home Alone and then went home and booby-trapped his tree fort.

The film revolves around a group of middle school friends in Lillian, Ohio, a small, hard-working industry town, the kind that now only exists in Chrysler commercials. The gang is filming a short zombie flick when they accidentally catch a train derailment, and its impending consequences, on film.

Soon, the Air Force has taken over Lillian, putting the town and its deputy sheriff, Jack Lamb — played expertly as usual by “Why hasn’t this guy been cast as a cowboy, yet?” Kyle Chandler — on high alert. It becomes apparent that the Air Force isn’t being forthcoming with the status of the train’s cargo — “That is on a need-to-know basis,” spews one officer — so, in classic sci-fi fashion, the investigation is left to those least-suited: children.

What follows is an adventure of the highest order, pitting a crew of 13-year-olds against the Air Force, their parents, and, eventually, the entire galaxy. Abrams handles the characters with a deft touch: he pushes their cheesiness to the brink, then rips them back to reality. And if that reality comes at the expense of a playground trampled by a tank, or an exploding oil tanker, all the better.

Super 8 is a frolic, a collective trip to childhood that left me walking out of the theater ready to climb a tree, grab a camera, and see what the world had to offer. It’s exactly what a summer movie should be, whether you’re 9 or 26.