Super 8 Review
The marketing for Super 8 makes these three promises: that it is an old school Spielbergian sci-fi adventure, complete with daddy issues, that there is a secret worthy of being kept that ties the plot together, and that the whole business has something to do with filmmaking. Twisty secrets and meta-artistic commentary are not new, but they are much more a part of a filmmakers palette in 2011 than in the 1980s. Thus there is an implicit fourth promise: that J.J. Abrams has something to add to the Spielberg oeuvre, that he is shooting E.T. meets The Goonies through a lens that acknowledges and respects the increased sophistication of 21st century audiences. Unfortunately, Super 8 only really keeps the first of these promises. It is a strong contender for best movie of the year – if that year is 1986.
Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is a middle schooler in 1979 Ohio who has just lost his mother in a steel mill accident. Four months after the funeral, he seems to be doing well, even if his father Jack (Kyle Chandler), a sheriff’s deputy, seems to be too lost in grief to be much of a parent. Joe spends his days helping his friends Charles (Riley Griffiths), Cary (Ryan Lee), Martin (Gabriel Basso), and Preston (Zach Mills) make a zombie movie in the eponymous film format. One night the boys sneak off to film a scene at the local train station, joined by Alice (Elle Fanning), a slightly older girl and Charles’s newly cast female lead. But their filming in interrupted by a spectacular (and apparently not accidental) train derailment. Though the kids escape the crash unharmed and undetected and vowing not to tell anyone what they saw, it soon becomes apparent that “something” is going on in town in the wake of the incident.
It’s a fine set up, and there is a lot to admire in the conception and execution of this story outline. The writing for and the acting of the kids nails the details; the boys give each other shit about just the right things, and even as Joe begins to nurse a little crush on Alice, he continues to talk like a geeky twelve year old. The train crash is a terrific set piece, even if it is a little hard to believe that cars could be flung hundreds of yards under the circumstances depicted, and even harder to believe that both our heroes and their car (parked right next to the station) should come through it without a scratch. And the first signs that something is up after the crash are such genre staples that they zoom right past cliché into nostalgia: a tight lipped Air Force and sinister colonel shows up to tell local law enforcement (i.e. Joe’s dad) that everything is under control, there are electrical disturbances throughout the town, people start to vanish, all the dogs run away. Classic stuff.
That’s all well and good and, as I say, nicely handled. But we were promised mystery. And there’s not one. All the initial clues point to some big inhuman thing having escaped the train and causing all the havoc around town, and *SPOILER ALERT* that’s exactly what is happening. Abrams smugly refuses to show us the creature for the first two acts and seems to think he is doing something clever. It’s not a bad technique for goosing tension, just a hoary one, and Abrams owes grown up movie audiences in 2011 a better pay off for it than “bug eyed thing”.
Perhaps the graver sin is how quickly the movie making theme is abandoned after the train station. True, the kids continue to film and discuss their movie, but it’s just filler; it doesn’t inform the monster story in any real way. The kids do capture the train crash and the escape of the creature on film, and there are supposedly tense scenes where our heroes are told it will take three whole days to get the film developed; meanwhile, the Air Force has found Super 8 film wrappers at the crash scene and so they know that someone was there with a camera. In other words, the Super 8 film is carefully set up to be a MacGuffin… and then is completely ignored. When the footage is eventually viewed, it occurs too late to drive the plot and reveals essentially nothing. None of this would matter, except the movie is called Super 8. Even if you don’t think it is fair to judge a movie for breaking the promises of its marketing, don’t you think it ought to at least keep the promises of its title?
If you’re looking for a nice family film, you could do a lot worse than Super 8. The heroes are winning and heroic. There are some nice special effects that enhance the story, rather than just being a being a symptom of BayDHD. Some flawed but loving fathers hug their kids. The one PG-13 sanctioned f-word is used well, and there are no fart jokes. It’s Abrams doing 1980s Spielberg, and if that’s all you want, you’ll be pleased. But if you expect 25 years of growing narrative sophistication and the sensibilities of Lost and Alias to be in evidence, then, unfortunately, you won’t find them here.
