Image from the Christian Science Monitor
The year is 1979. A group of kids, making their own movie using a Super 8 camera, are present when a freight train crashes in their town. But the train’s carrying some odd-behaving cargo, and soon the kids are swept up in an alphabet soup of conspiracy, mystery, death, unhealed emotional wounds, and love. You can see Spielberg’s fingerprints on the sweet stuff, but the heavy lifting falls, unfortunately, to Abrams, who here gives us an unofficial follow-up to his last overhyped ball of fire, Cloverfield.
You see, Super 8 is really two movies. One is sort of your standard something-is-amiss-in-a-small-town-and-the-military-is-hushing-it-up plot. The other is a more subtle, gentle look at growing and departing relationships, of loves past and present. And that’s sort of where the problem lies for me; although the two genres can mesh well, here one part works very well and the other is a pile of predictability.
The protagonist is young Joe (Joel Courtney), best friends with Charles (Riley Griffiths). Joe’s mom was killed in an accident at the local plant, an event that has had quite the effect on Joe and his relationship with his dad, the town’s deputy. As you might guess, Joe’s dad has grown distant with the loss of his wife, which he blames on the town drunk, leaving poor Joe sort of rudderless. That’s one of the reasons he pals around with Charles and the rest of his friends, to escape.
The boys are making a movie with Charles as the director, and they ask one of their classmates, Alice (Elle Fanning) to play the female lead. Charles secretly likes Alice, but it becomes clear she has an eye for modest, unassuming Joe, who does makeup and lighting. At any rate, while they are filming near an old train station, a speeding train passes them by, then derails. After the kids emerge from the wreckage relatively unscathed, they recover their film.
Of course, the train wasn’t carrying ordinary cargo, as the film soon proves. But what is it? This is where the influence of Cloverfield kicks in. Abrams tries hard not to show us the creature in its entirety until near the end of the movie, but that didn’t make it any scarier. The shots of the alien were amateurish, sometimes ridiculously staged as if straight out of a particularly poor B movie from 1953. I know the innocence of youth was a recurring theme, but I expected to be jumping a lot more than I was. In fact, here’s an example of just shoddy filmmaking: there would be this intense, suspense-inducing music playing while the camera focused on one character, then sudden silence. And then, wouldn’t you know it, an attack out of nowhere. No sir, didn’t see that coming!
So the exciting action scenes lacked a lot, like panache, creativity, chills, and even logic. Here’s another example. During the trainwreck scene, the kids flee as debris rains all around them. Not just pieces of wood but rather entire cars, huge chunks of metal, and so on. They’re never hit. All this stuff flying around, and they may as well have been in the perpetual center of a giant tornado. Sure, you have to suspend your disbelief, but there were a few howler scenes in this movie that really sort of forced you to metaphorically unhinge your jaw in order to properly suspend said disbelief.
The real upside to the movie, though, is the group of kids: they’re a terrific, convincing lot. Luckily, we don’t get stereotypical kids, like The Fat One or The Brain or The Slob, etc. Each isn’t terribly defined, but they’re not meant to be, and they’re still memorable in their own way. They exist less as window dressing and more as a running color commentary on their various relationships.
Fanning is terrific as Alice. I almost didn’t recognize her; at this age, she looks like a young Martha Plimpton, and if Ms. Fanning ever reads this, I mean that as praise. In a few scenes, she’s playing a girl playing an actress, and she nails it. I have to believe it’s not easy pretending to be something you’re not anyway, so pretending to pretend just doubles the difficulty.
Spielberg’s touch is evident in the way the kids relate to each other and to adults; there are no cardboard caricatures, just honest characters. We see the wonderment and guileless glee that most of us had in grade school. We see kids being kids, in awe and curious but not terrified of the world around them.
Spielberg’s contribution works; Abrams’ doesn’t. If you liked Cloverfield and its poorly edited action scenes, this will be your bag. The bad guys are obvious, the impetus for the creature’s existence is clear, and it’s all telegraphed well ahead of time. They must have spent a fortune in CGI, mucking up what might have been a tender growing-up story set against an alien-invasion backdrop.
Super 8: ***
I like J.J. Abrams’ work on Lost and I really liked what he did with the most recent the Star Trek reboot. But I don’t think his talents worked for me this time around either.
What made Lost so good was the fact that he played up a lot of mystery and secrets and the fun of the show was not in finding answers, but in seeing how people dealt with the fear of the unknown. That worked in a TV series format, where you could really flesh out the characters and grow to like, even love, them. That tactic didn’t work so well with this film. For most of the film, people were kind of oblivious as to what was going on and, when confronted by the unknown, it just seemed like there was an awful lot of screaming. Loud screaming. And it started to get irritating after a while. I’m not sure if it was because this movie had a really loud soundtrack, or if someone in the theater accidentally cranked up the volume for someone who was hard of hearing. In any case, I left with movie with a major headache. And in this instance, I don’t think being left in the dark worked as a plot device because there wasn’t enough to sustain me through the plot while I waited for answers, like there was in Lost. I got an E.T. meets the Goonies feel from it. But, in Super 8, the creature was nowhere near as lovable as E.T., and the kids weren’t as memorable as the Goonies… aside from the one who conveniently liked to blow things up.
It really did feel like two different movies to me that crisscrossed at random intervals and the whole thing never really felt like it came together. It was a long movie and it felt long. There was way too much down time. I enjoy a movie with a good, slow, build-up, like the one in X-Men: First Class, where the writer takes the time to put a lot of elements into place and then they collide at the end. But in the case of Super 8, I found myself getting bored. And the emotional dénouement of the film fell pretty flat to me. I didn’t see any significant moment where the two fathers had come to any major realizations, aside from a brief scene where the drunk guy apologizes to the other guy for his wife dying. I don’t think that was the fault of the cast because they had some very strong actors all around. I just don’t think most of them were given much material to work with. Kyle Chandler, Jessica Tuck and Ron Eldard (who are all ironically veterans from One Life to Live) were cast as parents and, when I saw them show up on the screen, I was hoping for some really good stuff because I’ve seen each of them turn out some terrific performances… particularly Jessica Tuck. This woman has the acting chops to rip your heart out and stomp all over it. But once again, she’s stuck playing the loving mom in the background while a bunch of younger performers take center stage. I know it was the kids’ movie, but it was disappointing to see all that talent go to waste, especially when the story is centered after the tragic death of a child’s mother.
I also didn’t feel any particular sympathy for the creature. (Possible spoiler alert) It seems like the trend these days in Hollywood is to design creatures to be dark, masses of anamorphic alien body parts with nearly indiscernible features. It probably makes the special effects easy because you just have to throw a blob with big teeth up on the screen and call it a day. That’s the problem I had with the Transformers films. Half the time you’re looking at the screen, all you see is moving pieces of metal that look like someone shredded a toaster and threw it in a blender. I just don’t relate all that well to blended toasters. Or to anamorphic alien bugs. They don’t convey emotion the way a more defined character can and that costs the movie a lot in terms of emotional impact, as far as I’m concerned. I hated Avatar, but the alien characters were much more memorable because they weren’t anamorphic blobs. This creature is pretty forgettable.
There were also some peculiar moments where there was a strange blue lens flare on the screen. I was waiting for them to explain that, but they never did. It actually made me think that the camera man was just not paying attention and they wound up having to release the film with those shots included because they ran out of time and couldn’t go reshoot them.
Overall, I was surprisingly disappointed.
I like your comments, Ray; they’re often almost as long as my review!
The blue flares bugged the hell out of me. I thought maybe it was something native to the filming process itself… but blue? A sun dog at night? Weird. And no, no explanation forthcoming.
Spielberg’s side of things was the kids’ interactions and stories, and I think it worked. Abrams’ contribution was the crappy monster, and it did not work.