“Kids walking around with their own stereo is just what we need. It’s a slippery slope, my friend.”
J. J. Abrams grew up idolizing Steven Spielberg, which is no surprise based on his directorial output. Super 8 is mostly a nostalgia piece that pulls together a plethora of concepts from Spielberg films.1 It’s fun but thoroughly derivative. It doubles as a love letter to homemade filmmaking, which, along with the 1980s setting gives it a vintage sheen. This grafting of two disparate concepts onto one another shows its seams, though. One one hand, there is a story of a group of children making an amateur zombie film to enter into a Super 8 competition. On the other, there is a trainwreck that looses an alien onto the unsuspecting town of Lillian. Though its ending doesn’t stick quite as well as the build-up, overall Super 8 is a satisfying popcorn movie.
The children’s story is very compelling, with Elle Fanning’s portrayal of Alice of particular note.2 These scenes are very reminiscent of E.T. and other 80s films from the genre. The movie begins with Joe (Joel Courtney), Alice, Charles (Riley Griffiths), Cary (Ryan Lee), Martin (Gabriel Brasso), and Preston (Zach Mills) sneaking out at night to shoot a scene for their zombie film at an empty train station. When they see a train approaching in the night, Charles—obsessed with “production value”—corrals the team into position to film as the train rolls by. Glancing over his shoulder while holding the boom mic, Joe sees a truck driving along the tracks toward the train. The train and the truck collide and explosions abound, destroying the train depot and littering the surrounding area with wreckage.
The kids discover that the driver of the vehicle is Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), their biology teacher. He is still alive, and warns them at gunpoint to forget that they saw anything, or they and their families will be killed. As military vehicles approach, they children flee, but not before Joe tucks one of the thousands of strange white cubes spilled from the train into his pocket. The children’s chemistry is excellent throughout, and the dialogue is refreshingly childish yet well written; the kids fight with one another, tease each other, become fixated on inconsequential things (like “production value,” model trains, and fireworks).
The more interesting of the two stories is the children continuing to make their movie, using the presence of legitimate military personnel to add to the “production value.” As the military searches through Dr. Woodward’s house to try to find his research, the kids are on the sidewalk out front filming, with Joe wearing a beret. They also return to the site of the trainwreck, filming on a hill so that the wreckage is in the background. There is an argument over whether or not Charles will be allowed to blow up Joe’s model train for additional footage. Whenever they finally receive the first roll of film they sent to be developed, we finally see the alien (it was smartly kept hidden and mysterious for much of the film), captured on the dropped camera the night of the crash.
The secondary storyline involves Joe’s father, Jack (Kyle Chandler), a police deputy who takes interim sheriff status when the real sheriff is taken by the alien. He is full of suspicion and uncovers a secret military plot called “Operation Walking Distance”. When he confronts Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich) and threatens to contact D.C., a meeting is arranged to speak privately. However, when Jack arrives he is forced to surrender at gunpoint and taken prisoner.
Eventually, the kids find Woodward’s research and find out about the creature that is terrorizing their town. Captured by the Air Force in 1958, they ran extensive testing on it, and discovered that the mysterious white cubes are a metallic alloy that can shapeshift into any form the alien wishes them to. When the creature physically contacts Woodward, they experience a psychic connection, and Woodward understands that the alien simply wants to rebuild his crashed ship and leave earth. The ending is a bit fumbled, as Joe must confront the alien, convince it that not all humans wish it harm, and rescue Alice from its clutches.
It is no secret that Super 8 is a feature length homage to Spielberg, with is consistent explorations of suburban teenage life being disrupted by extraordinary phenomena, seeing the world through children’s eyes, and broken families. While Abrams seems to have nailed his original goal, he sacrificed almost all trace of originality the film may have had otherwise. The student never surpasses the master, but emulates him so well that the film is about as compelling as the Spielberg classics.3
I know that Abrams is a filmmaker chiefly concerned with spectacle, crafting individual moments that evoke something within the viewer. He is very good at that. Where he struggles is in developing a film to prop up his best moments. He comes close here with the camaraderie of the children, the death of Joe’s mother, and the adolescent struggles with life and art, but it doesn’t come together in a completely satisfying way.
For me, the best part was the special feature titled ‘The Dream Behind Super 8’ which shows interviews with Abrams, fellow filmmakers Larry Fong and Matt Reeves, as well as Spielberg. Abrams tells a neat antidote detailing a time when he and his friends (including Reeves) had entered a Super 8 festival themselves, and after reading an article about them in the L.A. Times titled ‘The Beardless Wonders’, Spielberg hired them to transfer his own Super 8 films to videotape. Years later, when Abrams met Spielberg as a bonafide filmmaker himself, he tried to remind Spielberg of the task he had assigned the teenagers. Before he could say it, Spielberg said, “I know, you edited the movies that I made. Thank you.”
If you love the Spielberg classics, this will go down nicely. The direction is competent, the premise compelling, and the acting excellent (especially for having so many child actors). If you’re looking for something beyond a superficially pleasing popcorn flick, it probably isn’t for you.
1. Most filmmakers of his generation who dreamed of helming high concept Hollywood films idolized Spielberg. The dude directed a string of blockbusters that have stood the test of time, such as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park, and has remains a top director well into his 70s.
2. During the scene where the children are filming at the train station, they do a rehearsal as they walk through their lines. Fanning’s “rehearsal” is almost on-par with the rehearsal scene that Naomi Watts pulls off in Mulholland Drive (2002).
3. The two major things keeping this from being great are the underwhelming climax and its obvious emulation of Spielberg’s films.