3 ½ stars (out of four)
Set largely in the summer of 1979 in a small Ohio town, Super 8 follows the 13-year-old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) whose mother died the past winter in a factory accident. Joe’s father (Kyle Chandler) feels that a summer spent at baseball camp would be good for his son. As the town’s deputy, his work has not allowed him proper time to grieve and he needs a few months apart from his son.
Joe, however, does not have time for baseball camp. He needs to help his buddy Charles (Riley Griffiths) finish the zombie movie they have been shooting in time to enter a local film festival. An aspiring auteur, Charles is one of the film’s many pleasures. He shoots on the titular 8mm Kodak camera and while his friends double as cast and crew.
On a technical level, their film is surprisingly accomplished (they have no doubt perfected their zombie death scenes over many past summers) but Charles is unsatisfied. The film is missing something. It needs human interest. A story to make the audience care whether or not the characters’ brains are eaten by the undead. For this, they cast a girl from their school, Alice (Elle Fanning), as the love interest. This complicates matters for Joe, whose father has a past with Alice’s deadbeat dad (Ron Eldard).
The film must go on though and in one of the Super 8’s finest scenes, the sci-fi intrigue is introduced. During a late night shoot at a local train station, the kids scramble to film their scene while a train rushes past (“Production value!” exclaims Charles). What the kids wind up catching on camera is more incredible than they could have imagined. A car rushes onto the tracks to derail the train and we are treated to the first of several well-choreographed scenes of the aforementioned explosions.
What exactly the train is holding and why it is derailed I will not go into. The remainder of Super 8 follows the kids as they seek to uncover just that. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force comes into town to hide whatever it was that happened from the local authorities including Joe’s father.
J.J. Abrams has clearly taken a page (or more) from Spielberg’s book here (Spielberg also produced the film). The bobbing flashlights of government officials and overhead shots of quiet suburban sprawl are direct nods to E.T., and the charmingly ragtag band of young teens is reminiscent of the Spielberg-produced movie, The Goonies. Even as the mystery monster starts snatching up the locals, Super 8 remains focused on its young protagonists as they desperately ride through town on bikes and borrowed cars from their parents.
Spielbergian touches aside, this is also a J.J. Abrams movie. And Abrams likes to blow things up real good. After producing the 2008 shaky-cam hit Cloverfield, where a Godzilla-sized sea monster beheaded the Statue of Liberty, Abrams has again delivered a killer monster mash that reinvigorates the genre.
While Cloverfield was content to simply destroy Manhattan and nothing more, Abrams adds some of that human interest the young Charles seeks to include in his own movie. Some of that human interest is a little heavy-handed – the sentimental themes of fatherly love and overcoming grief are not subtle – and the script is hardly flawless. There are some clunky expository lines and a few minor characters are picked up and dropped at the plot’s convenience, but these flaws have a certain charm to them. I was relieved to see that only one person – J.J. Abrams – wrote the film and not the team of writers that is usually a sign of many studio rewrites. The storytelling weaknesses in Super 8 are weaknesses in their own right and not the result of story being neglected in favor of special effects.
The script may not be terribly sophisticated in its exploration of how parents and children cope with grief (Spielberg himself has handled this much better in his own films) but Abrams gives Super 8 some charming touches that set it aside from less personal summer movies. He fills the town with colorful side characters, local inhabitants wrapped up in their own lives, unaware that a monster movie is happening around them and that they are not the stars.
Super 8 is prime summer entertainment and a sign that good genre movies are far from dead. This is a film with genuine heart whose sci-fi elements stem from a love of genre flicks as opposed to a love of box office. The best advice Super 8 takes from the great Spielberg blockbusters is to embrace its appreciation for B-movie fun and to hook the audience in by offering characters that we will remember vividly long after we forget how exactly that monster looked.
- Steve Avigliano, 6/20/11
dis movie wuz gud but still makes me h8 dakota fanning
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