Before Super 8 begins, it is introduced by the once-ubiquitous image of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in a bicycle basket passing in front of the moon.
The Amblin Entertainment logo is scarce these days – borne by only one other film, Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, since 2006 – and that is exactly how director J.J. Abrams wants it, since Super 8 is his own personal love letter and unabashed tribute to the Amblin (mostly Spielberg) movies of yore and their classic 1980s action-adventure ilk.
It’s 1979, and 13-year-old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), son to the sheriff (Kyle Chandler) of the fictional town of Lillian, Ohio, is distracting himself from the death of his mother in a steel mill accident by helping his friends Charles (Riley Griffiths), Preston (Zach Mills), Martin (Gabriel Basso), and Carey (Ryan Lee) make a zombie movie on Super 8 film.
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Super 8 Directed by J.J. Abrams Starring Joel Courtney, Kyle Chandler, Elle Fanning, Ron Eldard, Noah Emmerich, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills, Gabriel Basso |
Charles, the director, decides to add a female character – a wife – to the story for emotional depth (“It matters because she loves him,” he says, trying to explain audience involvement to his skeptical friends). He settles on Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning), the distant but alluring daughter of the town drunk and ne’er-do-well, Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard).
Here the running meta-commentary gets a bit cutesy: adding a female character to the film-within-a-film entails adding her to the parent film, and a love interest in one level inevitably becomes a love interest in the other.
But then things change gear as the kids’ movie production is interrupted by an explosive train wreck, a wave of missing dogs and people and electrical parts, and the sudden descent of the Air Force upon the town, led by a prototypical overbearing military-type named Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich).
Something is running amok in Lillian: something powerful enough to hurl cars, intelligent enough to remain unseen as it terrorizes the town, and dangerous enough to require the utmost containment efforts on the part of the Air Force.
At its heart, Super 8 is two different things, a story about childhood and friendship and also, simultaneously but separately, a monster-of-the-week special about what could be a distant cousin to Cloverfield’s titular menace.
Unfortunately for Abrams and the movie overall, the primary connection between these two strands is the director’s resolve to pay tribute to movies that combined similar elements, rather than anything arising organically from this particular story. Character arcs go foreshortened and descend into predictable cliché to allow for tense monster-attack scenes; and the beast itself is given fairly predictable treatment so that it fits neatly into the unfolding human drama.
With a few scenes lifted from other movies (E.T. and Jurassic Park among them) giving it an aspect of Tarantinoesque “filmmaking by pastiche,” Super 8 ultimately feels less like a love letter than a derivation, a bald attempt at revisiting something done previously and well.
But if it doesn’t quite have the monster stuff down pat, Super 8 at least does justice to its young heroes (and heroine), marking a welcome departure from the trend of overly precocious child protagonists in favour of kids who look and sound like kids, joking and laughing and arguing to create an incessant wall of sound worthy of a Phil Spector production. Their pitch-perfect interactions, including what goes into their zombie movie, provide the larger film with most of its best moments.
Though it falls far short of the spellbinding mark it set as its goal, Super 8 effectively recalls some of the wonderful cinema of decades past – if thanks to its vintage suburban setting more than anything that happens there and its cast of earnest youngsters for their characters more than their adventures.