(Long Island, N.Y.) Whenever a movie comes out with a number in its title, and that movie isn’t a sequel to something, my friends and I have this running gag that just never gets old. Take Super 8 for instance…the joke would be to say, “Well, I didn’t see the first 7, but…” I’m telling ya, it never ceases to crack us up.
Anyway, Super 8 is a sci-fi movie written and directed by J. J. Abrams (2009’s Star Trek reboot) and produced by Steven Spielberg that’s about a group of kids growing up in 1979 Ohio who are all working together on making their own homemade zombie movie shot on Super 8 film. One of the kids, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), has recently lost his mother to an industrial factory accident, and he’s understandably all mopey about it…at least until he meets the daughter of town drunk, Alice (Elle Fanning), whose father was kinda, sorta responsible for the demise of Joe’s mother. It’s complicated. However, Alice is super-cute, and Joe and his friends rope her into working on their little film with them.
At this point the film is very enjoyable. The kids in Joe’s
little band are all fun and engaging, although aside from Joe and Alice, none of them are really given much to say or do and all of them are basically clichéd, typical Hollywood child archetypes: the fat wise-ass, the glasses-wearing nerd, the runt with a backpack full of fireworks. But it works on a surface level, and Joe and Alice’s characters are fleshed out and well-acted enough that it’s not a big deal. Overall, Super 8 starts out as a rather charming coming-of-age tale.
Then a train crashes while the kids are filming a pivotal scene in their zombie movie, a top-secret government thingy escapes from said train and starts causing all sorts of shenanigans around town, and things for the audience start to go slightly downhill.
Let’s start with the train wreck (an appropriate catalyst for the turn the movie takes in this instance, metaphorically speaking): while shooting at a local train station at night, the kids notice a pickup truck turn onto the tracks and crash head-on with a military locomotive going full-speed ahead. It’s revealed later that the driver did this on purpose for reasons that we’ll keep secret for the time being.
Anyway, what results is the most over-the-top crash in history…the train practically shreds and every possible thing that can explode does indeed explode, as loudly and as often as possible. It lasted for what seemed to be 20 minutes, as kids were running to and fro, dodging debris and fireballs left and right. It was just too much, given that this didn’t start out as an 80’s Action flick.
But that wasn’t even the most ridiculous thing about that scene! After the area has almost been rendered the equivalent of Hiroshima at ground zero, the kids discover that the whacked-out driver that caused the disaster is not only alive, but still sitting in his mostly-intact pickup! Um…what the hell?
From there, the military shows up and the movie starts doing its best to rip-off the feel of Spielberg flicks like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. At that point, the movie went from “very enjoyable” to “just okay.”
The problem is that the two halves just don’t gel with one another. Super 8 was a better and more original film when the kids were making the zombie movie before the stupid mini-Cloverfield alien and his army buddies showed up. From that scene onward, the movie starts regurgitating
a
lot of familiar imagery and story elements seen in many early Spielberg works. Super 8 never gets outright bad, but despite all the things blowing up and flying around and all the
people who are placed in mortal danger, you never find yourself as involved as when it was just a gang of dorky kids with monster make-up shooting a little home movie.
There was a lot of hype put into Super 8’s release, and while the end result of the collaboration between Abrams and Spielberg is solid, it just makes me wonder what the film could have been if Abrams just followed his own imagination instead of trying to re-capture the Spielberg of old. As far as I’m concerned, Super 8 was a curious little diversion, but now that Abrams has indulged his inner-child, let’s finally get cracking on that Star trek sequel, okay?
