It’s been widely publicized that Super 8 is director J.J. Abram’s tribute to the early works of Steven Spielberg. But, more than that, it’s a tribute to the freedoms and innocent optimism of childhood. Specifically, the childhood of those of us who grew up in the late 70s and early 80s. Before kids were dressing too sexy or talking on cell phones, before reality television made fame everyone’s life goal. It was a time when childhood was filled with imagination, creativity, and romance. There wasn’t a constant stream of information to wade through, so you had to make your own entertainment. Young minds were still factories, not junkyards. Super 8 can be viewed as a sort of greatest hits reel of Spielberg’s work from the 80s. It’s got that sense of reaching out into the unknown of Close Encounters, the misunderstood alien persecuted by the government of E.T., it’s got the mysterious predator hidden in the shadows of Jaws, and the group of young misfits coming together for an adventure of The Goonies. But, even though it’s status as homage has been publically acknowledged, to look at Super 8 only in the context of what it achieves as a mirror to Spielberg’s work would be to ignore everything that it is able to accomplish on it’s own.
Yes Super 8 feels like it comes from the past. Yes it has a lot in common with the best of classic Spielberg. But there are no winks here, no kitschy references. There are no parodies of famous scenes from blockbusters past or surprise cameos from actors who did famous work from the Spielberg catalogue. It just conjures up a feeling. It takes you back to a time and a place when things were simpler. It jogs your memory and utilizes your already built in fondness for this sort of story to make things hit harder than they would otherwise. I wouldn’t necessarily call it nostalgia though. To me, nostalgia means liking something solely for the sake of it being reminiscent of something else. For all that Super 8 conjures up memories of past movie going experiences, it’s a true success only because it works on it’s own as a stand-alone piece of art. Super 8 doesn’t feel like the movies that get made these days, but it’s not because it’s part of some forgotten genre, it’s not because it’s paced any differently from modern films, and it doesn’t use any sort of dated filmmaking techniques. It just feels different because it’s a big budget spectacle that’s more interested with people than it is conflict or action. Its biggest goal is crafting characters that you can see yourself in and root for, and then it explores the ways that they interact and communicate with each other. Despite the fact that this is a summer movie with a big bad monster at the center of it, Super 8 is not an action film. It’s a movie about exploration. It’s about reaching out to and understanding the unknown, whether that unknown be a mysterious creature terrorizing your town, the cute girl across the street that you’ve never had the courage to talk to, or even your own father. You just don’t see that much these days.
Super 8 starts with a death. It’s the death of our protagonist Joe Lamb’s (Joel Courtney) mother, to be exact. We don’t get any dramatic images of a coffin being lowered into the ground, there’s no slow motion sequence of tears running down Joe’s face as a sad song plays. Super 8 lets us get to know our characters in more subtle ways than that. Instead we get an image of one of those signs in a factory, you know, the ones that count down from the last time there was an industrial accident. A maintenance man is changing it from some sort of lengthy number down to one. Joe’s mom was the accident, it was so bad there wasn’t even much left of her body to identify. From there we go to the wake, a neighborhood full of mourners cram themselves into Joe and his dad’s (Kyle Chandler) house. Joe sits alone outside; clutching a silver locket like it’s a life preserver. Joe’s dad Jackson looks grim. He’s a distant, hard man, one of the town sheriff’s deputies. A couple of women openly wonder how such a man is going to be able to raise a kid on his own. Their suspicions appear to be founded when he ejects somebody from and arrests them at his own wife’s wake. Jackson is wrestling with a lot of conflicting emotions in the wake of his wife’s death, and he doesn’t seem to be the sort of man that’s used to dealing with things like that. Joe isn’t alone, stuck in his house with his father, though. He has a best friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) who is a budding film director, and a crew of friends who he makes Super 8 monster movies with. There’s Charles, who’s bossy, but passionate. He’s often derided due to his status as the neighborhood fat kid (back when neighborhoods only had one fat kid) and he uses his film making projects as a way to reach out and make connections with people. There’s Cary (Ryan Lee), a charismatic little ADD case who also happens to have a pretty extreme case of pyromania. Every group of friends had one. There’s Martin (Gabriel Bosso), who acts as the leading man and has a problem with puking under pressure. There’s Preston (Zach Mills), who’s kind of a coward, but does an amazing job pretending like he’s talking on the phone. And then there’s Alice (Elle Fanning), the object of both Joe and Charles’ affection. The pretty little blonde girl who they can’t believe agreed to be in their zombie movie. And the daughter of that drunken guy who Joe’s dad arrested at his mom’s wake. Alice’s dad was supposed to be working the shift when Joe’s mom got killed, but he was off on a bender instead, so she had to cover it. Jackson blames him for the death, and whenever he sobers up long enough, he blames himself as well. Joe and Alice’s dads don’t get along, so any potential romance between them would be star crossed and ill fated. But a mutual kindness begins to draw the two kids together nonetheless.
This could have been a film just about these kids and their trials and tribulations attempting to get a movie made and enter it into an amateur filmmaking contest, and I’m certain it would have been an absolute delight. But trouble arises when the crew gathers to shoot a key scene at an isolated train platform, and they end up witnessing a horrific and explosive derailment. All of the kids survive, but they’re left shaken and curious as to the particulars of what they saw. The derailment was caused by a teacher at their school driving onto the tracks. He was carrying a map of the train’s route and rambling about conspiracy when they found him. The wreck left thousands of weird looking white Rubik’s Cubes scattered all over the ground. And in one of the cars there was a strange, loud banging. It sounded like they were keeping an elephant in there. The mystery grows over the next few days as the town’s dogs make a beeline for anywhere but here, people start disappearing, and the town’s car engines, microwaves, and power lines all start getting snatched up by someone or something. The military comes in, taking the town over and cleaning up the mess, but they seem like clueless jerks. As it goes in most of these monster movies, it’s going to be up to the kids to take care of this situation.
I didn’t love Super 8 absolutely, there were a couple of things that stuck in my craw that I could pick out as flaws; but on the whole the film worked so well that any complaints I noted while watching seemed very minor and were soon forgotten. A lot has been said about J.J. Abrams cinematic style and his overuse of lens flares to add a stylistic flourish, and he does that here; probably more egregiously than he has in anything else. It’s pretty distracting. Also, there are times where the plot breaks down under scrutiny. There’s a scene where the kids break into their ex-teacher’s storage locker in order to find clues about the monster running around town. Instantly, in a locker crammed full of forgotten antiquities, they are able to pull out exactly the bit of film they need, queued up to exactly the right moment they need to watch, in order to solve the case of what’s going on and how to deal with it. It’s done this way for the sake of pacing, and I can hardly blame them for being concerned about that; but the moment comes off as a little bit insulting when taken in the context of what tries to be a (within the realm of science fiction) realist narrative.
Things like that are hard to complain about, though, when the characters are all so likeable and so well written. This group of kids is the best presented and most memorable I’ve seen in a film in as long as I can remember. Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning aren’t super attractive kids. They’re not the hottest young pop stars that get their faces in the tabloids most frequently. They’re cute kids who have interesting faces and are able to emote incredibly well. They’re actors, not names, and they have an innate warmth and magnetism that makes it impossible for you not to root for them in their plights, both romantic and life threatening. Courtney is a real find, as he seems completely natural while anchoring this gigantic production. Fanning is somebody who I’ve been impressed with already due to her performance in Sofia Coppola’s character piece Somewhere, but here she goes beyond even what she showed in that film and really gives a consistently scene stealing performance throughout the entire film. That scene on the train platform, before the derailment, where the other kids slowly realize that they’ve actually bagged a talented actress to be in their movie, it’s simply magical. If anyone is going to walk away from this film a newly minted star it’s going to be Fanning.
The stuff with the monster stalking the town and killing people, while not as enthralling as the interpersonal bits with the children, is handled expertly as well. Each of the victims that gets taken out by the beast is an entertaining character in their own right. There are no faceless Gas Station Employee #1 type roles in this film. Every character, no matter how small, gives its actor a personality to work with. Whether it’s the greasy teenager that works at the gas station and loves his Walkman or the stoner guy who works at the camera shop and has a crush on Charles’ older sister, everyone gets a chance to shine. I’m sure that will be a positive to this film that rewards viewers who re-watch. The monster itself is presented in a very Jaws-like manner. We never see him fully throughout the majority of the movie. We get obscured glimpses here and there. There’s a shadow, a quick image of a spider-like limb. Most of what he does is left up to our imagination. On one hand, it works effectively to present the thing as a completely alien, unknown threat; which works thematically with everything else going on in this film. On the other hand, it builds up an anticipation for what the monster is that can’t possibly end up as anything other than a disappointment. Ultimately I went with what they did though. If the thing had been shown too early, or featured too prominently, it would have became a sympathetic character in it’s own right, which would have undercut the undercurrent of detachment and broken down communication that drives much of the tension and conflict in this film.
Most of what this movie is about is the way in which we can live so deeply in our own minds that it creates a barrier between ourselves and other people. The driving momentum of this film is the characters learning to understand those around them. It’s about the dad who doesn’t understand his film nerd son and is too burdened with responsibility to take the time to put himself in his shoes. It’s about the fat kid who doesn’t know how to get people to like him, so he approaches them under the guise of working on his film projects. It’s about the daughter who doesn’t get her father, because she is too young to understand the cloud of booze and sadness that has consumed his life. It’s about the government men who are so focused on procedures and routines that they’ve forgotten how to be human. And it’s about the alien monster who has been too abused by men due to their self-involved natures to be anything other than angry and spiteful at our entire species. At every level of this film we are presented with characters who need to either reach out and begin to better understand those around them, or perish. The most adorable and heartwarming aspect of that theme is the love story that develops between Joe and Alice as they tentatively grow closer and closer over the course of the film. The romance between these two kids, in this throwback monster movie, is so much more successful and affecting than any of the courtships in any of the so-called “romantic comedies” I’ve seen over the past decade, that it’s not remotely funny. The more complex way that this film explores that theme is in the relationships between fathers and their children. There’s a clumsy lack of understanding that often exists between dads and their kids. The man of the house needs to be the breadwinner; they are out traversing the dog-eat-dog world of commerce most of the day. They’re always on guard, always trying to be strong. They talk exclusively to other adults, deal exclusively in adult situations. It’s hard to come home and relate to a child after that. And it’s hard to be a hands-on parent who takes control of your kid’s actions but still treats them like an equal and a worthwhile human being. There are huge, natural stumbling blocks that sit between a kid and a dad liking each other, and not everyone can get over them and cultivate a strong relationship. Super 8 deals with two different types of dads trying that, and it reminded me that any man who makes a legit effort to connect with their kids on a one on one level deserves to be commended. Perhaps it’s a coincidence of scheduling, but Super 8 actually works as a great Father’s Day movie.
And it works great as a present for lovers of film and people who refuse to grow up in general. Not only is this a throwback to an era of blockbuster movies that most of us look back on fondly, it also has the additional layer of being about kids who love movies themselves. The side story of the kid’s zombie movie, and the process of them getting it made, would work as a satisfying short film unto itself. And when we get to finally see the fruits of their labor during the end credits, I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear watching the results of their clumsy but earnest efforts. Mostly though, when I was watching this movie I found myself wishing that I could see it for the first time as a kid. It’s interesting what sorts of films affect kids the most. Their experience is so limited that it’s hard to really hit them close to home. They can watch a war movie and enjoy the thrills, but they’ve never actually known someone who’s died in a war, so a large part of the drama of the situation is inherently lost on them. They can watch an adventure movie set in exotic locals, but they’ve never actually traveled anywhere too far away, so the tactile, sensory experience of being somewhere completely foreign is largely lost on them. In order to really make a movie hits home with a kid, you have to engage them on their own level; and Super 8 definitely does so. The action is set in a normal town and it happens to normal people. There’s a scene where the government takes over their town with tanks and guns that was maybe my favorite of the film. Soldiers are everywhere, their tanks and guns and missile launchers are firing willy-nilly due to the things that the monster is up to, and the kids are put right in the middle of it. They’re running through their neighbors’ houses, across well-manicured lawns, jumping over chain link fences; and there’s an insane war scene happening all around them. You can’t help but put yourself in their shoes and wonder how you would react if this happened to your town. If only I was able to somehow de-age myself and experience this film for the first time as a child. This isn’t just an homage to the movies that came out during my childhood; it’s a new film that’s coming out during someone else’s childhood. It’s food for imagination that is going to create and stimulate an entirely new generation of cinephiles. Say what you will about the degradation of modern culture, the commercial focus of modern Hollywood killing creativity; as long as there are films out there like Super 8 and kids that are going to see them, creativity will never die. Perhaps the new generation’s minds don’t have to be a junkyard after all.
