WARNING: This review will use minor spoilers, which I don’t like to do, but feel I need to in order to explain my feelings towards the film.
Until about 3/4 of the way through, J.J. Abrams Super 8 feels like a love letter to children of the eighties. Anyone not of my generation, will not understand this as the film conjures up feelings of earlier Spielberg films like Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and E.T. all while recreating the political climate and mood of the time.
Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) has recently lost his mother in an accident in the local steel mill after she took over the shift of Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard) who was drunk. It was a decision that would have fatal consequences. Four months pass and Joe’s father, Jackson, (Kyle Chandler) the local Police deputy is struggling to come to terms with raising a child by himself and is contemplating sending his son off to summer camp. Not wanting to go, Joe puts his focus into helping his friends make their make their own zombie film (of course!) with a Super 8 camera. In order to enter the local film festival. in order to get the “shot” that the group wants, the kids need to go to the town’s train station, here they enlist the help of Alice (Elle Fanning) who can drive a car, but shouldn’t of course.
While at the train station, they see the perfect opportunity to film while a passing train goes by, of course this is where everything starts to go wrong. While filming, Joe notices a UTE (or pick-up truck if you’re American) drive onto the tracks and collide with the passing train. This sets into motion a massive derailment of the train and in turn a brilliantly realized action sequence reminiscent of the train derailment from 1993′s “The Fugitive”. It’s at this point something escapes from one of the train cars… something big, an alien. Now as trailers do tend to do these days, revealing an alien was aboard the train isn’t a revelation.
Scared, the children find the UTE that crashed the train and find it’s their biology teacher Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman) who is responsible. Heavily injured, he informs the children that they should leave and never talk about this to anyone unless they want to be killed. For the next hour we follow the fortunes of the town, the children, it’s inhabitants and recieve careful glimpses of the alien and the effects the alien has on the town from both itself and the military who are chasing it down.
As films go, Super 8 is clearly the work of an excellent film maker, technically and artistically J.J. Abrams is one of the best working today. His attention to detail, character development and technical adeptness at recreating the period are second to none, it feels at times, like I’m watching a film made in the early eighties by Spielberg, not one made in 2011. It’s just such a shame then that his own script appears to have let him down some what and in this regard I’m talking about the sympathy we feel for the alien wanting to get home.
From the derailment scene in Super 8, all we’ve seen in glimpses is a quite scary looking alien who has been attacking people left and right. We’re told in a matter of fact way that it’s acting this way because “it’s frightened” and “wants to go home”. I’m sorry but this lazy round about way of shortening the film by 20 minutes so it fits around the 2 hour run time does not make me feel compassion for the monster at all, if there had been more interaction between the children and the alien to create a connection with the audience where they would help it get home, maybe I would have cared more, but as it is the alien escaping in it’s space ship home feels more like Edgar from “Men In Black” escaping earth than E.T wanting to “go home”
My feelings aside, Super 8 is a brilliant example of the blockbuster summer film, it’s well put together, contains an excellent narrative, well story boarded action scenes, great acting from all the cast (especially the children) and there is not one use of rushed action scenes with a naff music video played over the top to cater to the attention starved generation. Maybe it’s these reasons the film hasn’t made a bazillion dollars at the box office so far compared to other blockbuster fare of the past.
