Super 8

What can I say? It was… SUPER!!!

The H-Bomb: A group of small town kids in the late 70’s are filming a scene for a movie late one night, when they witness a pick-up truck collide head on with a train, resulting in, as I’m sure you can imagine, one massive, nasty ass wreck. Upon inspecting the carnage, they discover hundreds of white, metallic rubix cube looking things that were amongst the train’s cargo. They also find that the driver of the pick-up is their middle school biology teacher, who improbably survived the crash (this movie has many virtues, realism is not one of them). He ominously warns them to leave and to not discuss what they saw that night, even to their parents.

The kids then make a hasty split from the crash site just as the military descends upon it, but not before grabbing the Super 8 camera which had been filming the entire time. The military, as sinister and secretive as they always are, lock down the crash site and arouse suspicions amongst the townsfolk. In the following days, some really strange shit starts to happen around town; the power goes out, pets disappear, people disappear, car engines and electric appliances of all varieties have gone missing, encrypted broadcasts are heard over the airwaves, and a strange creature has been causing damage… the kind of damage that no one could sensibly blame on some wild dog.

Please excuse my giddiness. I’ll try my best to contain it, but… wow! Just fucking wow! What we have here is the kind of movie that‘s as rare these days as a funny episode of “The Simpsons“, an event picture that has a helluva lot more to offer than action and effects. Yeah, there’s plenty of both to be found, but on top of all that there’s also intelligence, humor, credible, endearing characters, genuine emotion, and heart. “Super 8” is much more than a movie, it’s an experience. And as Swift put it, it’s one that really must be seen in a theater to get that full experience. By trying to experience it in any other way, you would only be doing yourself a grave, disgusting, unforgivable disservice.

I don’t think the words exist to adequately describe how watching this made me feel, or how much I absolutely fucking loved it. I mean, damn, I went into this with moderate expectations, and was therefore totally unprepared for what this movie did to me. Watching it, I felt like a kid again, like I was on one of those great Universal theme park rides… and I mean that in the best way possible. I was zapped back to a kind of magical space and time… yeah.

Now I’m gonna steer away from plot specifics here, because this is a film that is best experienced knowing as little about it as possible. In fact, don’t read any reviews (except the ones found here) before seeing it. By design, we the audience are meant to go through the story the way the characters do, as a great big mystery where things are gradually revealed, and each revelation is a big deal. What’s happening in this town? What is this creature that we only get brief, blurry glimpses of? What does it want? What is the purpose of the white, Rubik’s Cube things?

“Super 8” is a movie that’s more or less cobbled together from many, many movies of the past, including, most noticeably, a number of movies made by the producer of this film, Steven Spielberg. There are echoes of “The Goonies”, “E.T.”, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, to name a few. This is the kind of movie Spielberg would have made before he went all serious on us in the mid-90’s, with the boyish camaraderie and the sense of wonder and adventure. The film also includes elements from more recent Sci-Fi monster movies like “Cloverfield” and “District 9”, though this one is far superior to both of those.

Normally, this is something I would hold against a film, but writer/director J.J. Abrams makes it work so wonderfully, so absolutely pitch perfectly, that not only do I not hold it against him, I fucking applaud him for it. It’s another way in which the film took me back to my childhood. Some people may take pause over the fact that there’s so much Spielberg homaging in this thing, but I assure you, it takes the very best elements of Spielberg’s work and leaves out the weaker aspects associated with him, such as over-sentimentally and over-length.

With a title like “Super 8”, I was afraid that this was gonna go that bullshit faux-documentary route that’s really getting fuckin’ old by now, but it doesn’t. Abrams directs the film, even the action, in a smooth, composed, non-shaky cam way that again harkens back to the pre-”Private Ryan” Spielberg. The action itself is especially impressive, where we practically feel the bangs, and booms, and crunches, as if we were actually there. That’s what I meant when I said it reminded me of the Universal rides, it made me feel like I was right smack in the middle of it all. The fact that this flick was only made for $45 million, peanuts by summer blockbuster standards, makes it all the more astonishing.

But this film is not all about bangs and booms. In fact, Abrams has the pyrotechnics completely take a back seat to the characters and their story. Our protagonist is Joe (Joel Courtney), a kid of about 13 or 14, who has been going through a lot of shit. He’s coping with the recent death of his mother. His Deputy Sheriff father (Kyle Chandler) wants to send him to baseball camp for the summer, while Joe really wants to stay and help his best friend finish his movie. He’s developed feelings for local girl Alice (Elle Fanning), while both of their fathers want to keep them apart, for reasons later revealed. All the while, Joe has taken it upon himself to get to the bottom of all the weird shit that’s happening in town. There, that is all I will say about the plot, I promise.

All the young actors were very impressive in their roles, especially Courtney and Fanning. I got a real sense of the characters’ relationships with each other; the believable bond between the boys, the interactions between the kids and parents, it all rang very true and I think is an even stronger asset to the film than the many moments of spectacle. Abrams struck just the right balance between character development and the overall Sci-Fi mystery plot, which is quite a compliment as I can’t really say that about too many other movies. As a director, he showed considerable improvement between “Mission: Impossible III” and “Star Trek”, and now, after seeing… no, experiencing this movie, I am a full blown fan of his. Whatever he does next, I will be there.

Unlike my only other 5 star rated film, “Black Swan”, this is one that I can comfortably recommend to everyone. Man, woman, boy, girl, young, old… everyone. In fact, I demand people see it. For anyone who loves science fiction, this is a must see. For anyone who loves disaster movies, this is a must see. For anyone who grew up on Spielberg films, this is a must see. For fans of film in general, this is a definite, undeniable must see.  There is no waiting for DVD allowed with this one. “Super 8” demands to be seen on the big fuckin’ screen. Period.

P.S.- This is not the first time Abrams tipped his hat to Spielberg. Way back in the day, he co-wrote a little flick called “Joy Ride”, which pretty much owes its existence to “Duel”.