Running Time: 1 hr, 52 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: J.J. Abrams
Quick Impressions:
I’ve been excited about this movie for over a year. Long has it been my number one must-see for 2011. Amazingly (given the limited information revealed in trailers) the film delivered exactly what I expected. Equal parts E.T., Goonies, and Cloverfield, Super 8 captivates viewers from the opening scene and never loses the energy it builds. A well-told story about how to tell a story well, Super 8 has such heart and portrays the wonder, adventure, and danger of adolescence with such beguiling reverence that the film’s metadramatic self-commentary never becomes distracting, but, on the contrary, advances the plot and enhances the story.
The movie pops with arresting visuals, jarring explosions, and heart-stopping scares, and Abrams seamlessly uses these elements to tell a story brimming with such iconic spookiness that it sounds like it originated around a campfire. But strip away all the special effects and big budget horror, and you find a surprisingly simple story about love, loss, reconciliation, empathy, and ultimately survival in an imperfect world. Abrams gets help selling his engaging story from a talented cast portraying characters so sympathetic that audience members may easily identify with one or more of them. As a group, the child actors are possibly the most amazing I’ve seen in any movie. I would have continued watching them even if the train had never crashed.
The Good and The Great:
Admittedly, I’m a bit of a sucker for metadrama. I love the tongue-in-cheek discussion of the horror genre in Scream and the effect of the play-within-a-play in Hamlet. Through the character of aspiring young filmmaker Charles, writer-director J.J. Abrams essentially gives the audience a glimpse of his inner child and helps them to understand how to watch his movie. I love the idea that Abrams, who made Super 8 movies as a kid, has now grown up to write and direct a movie about the child he once was writing and directing Super 8 movies. I also love the irony that the kids making a zombie movie find themselves living out a story even more outlandish and terrifying than the fictional world of their campy monster flick.
And although his work is amateurish, Charles’s instinct is so sound. The most important part of a story is the heart, and Super 8 has plenty of that. Empathy is key to this story of how loss can make you realize the value of keeping what you have. Touching other people, being touched by them—this is what life is about. The uncanny ways in which the drama unfolding in Lillian, Ohio, mirror the drama unfolding in the Lamb household are the sign of a well written script. The similarities make the audience think, help the characters grow, and on a purely narrative level make the entire situation seem that much more creepy and unnerving.
In the end, Charles and his friends manage to make a pretty enjoyable movie, and Abrams and Spielberg make a great one that seems likely to be a future classic. Though action packed, the movie never seems rushed. It also never drags or gets boring. The beginning is beautifully paced, and the ending gives the expected sense of closure.
What happens in the middle is such a pleasure to watch. The movie lovingly recreates the world of young teens living in Ohio in 1979. Watching a scene where Sheriff Pruitt, played by Brett Rice, enters a convenience store to pay for his gas, I marveled at the attention to detail. The sheriff listens to the clerk’s explanation of his newfangled Walkman, but that obvious gesture was far from the only detail that established the setting. I kept wondering, Whom exactly does a filmmaker consult to recreate the interior of a late seventies gas station convenience store? I loved all the discontinued candy wrappers in the store. I also enjoyed the décor of the kids’ rooms, particularly the Rock Em Sock Em Robots game in Joe’s bedroom.
I loved the feeling of nostalgia in the movie. Watching it, you feel that 1979 was a simpler time, a time when kids rode bikes, “borrowed” cars, ate Twizzlers, hurled un-PC insults at each other, had hobbies that didn’t involve a computer screen or video game console. People weren’t as plugged in, and kids could really get away with stuff because the people watching weren’t able to watch as closely.
Another thing I really liked about the movie—watching the young actors pretend to have various levels of acting skill as they performed in the movie-within-a-movie. Joel Courtney gives a fantastic, compelling performance as Joe Lamb, but Joe Lamb is pretty wooden in the zombie movie. Elle Fanning’s Alice impresses her fellow filmmakers by crying real tears as the movie detective’s devoted wife, but Fanning’s performance in Super 8, though similarly impressive is far more nuanced—great in a completely different way.
Best Action Sequence:
As the film progresses, the stakes get higher, the action more intense until finally, normal life is swallowed up by the growing threat and returning to the status quo is no longer an option. The amateur filmmakers have a camaraderie that kept making me think fondly of The Goonies, but they’re trapped in a storyline of escalating horror much more similar in tone to Jurassic Park or Cloverfield. They can’t give up on their quest and ride a bucket up a wishing well to civilization because civilization is crumbling around them. If they give up, they will die. They might die, anyway. So as the movie goes on, the action sequences become longer and increasingly complex.
Still, in spite of all that, the train wreck that sets the subsequent events into motion is hard to top in terms of excitement, suspense, and alarmingly loud explosions. The scene works so well, in part, because of the set up. We’ve been patiently watching the plans of Charles and his fellow filmmakers come together, knowing in the back of our minds that something big, something terrible is about to happen. Up till that point, nothing out of the ordinary has happened—although the rehearsal at the train station gives us a different kind of satisfaction with its sweet, soulful comedy—so we’re on the edges of our seats, holding our breath with excitement. But despite our heightened expectations, the scene still delivers, not only an exquisitely loud series of explosions, but also some scares, some laughs, and a surprising development that adds an unexpected kind of menace as well as an element of mystery.
Best Joke:
The kids engage in lots of witty banter that feels very natural and relaxed, but I particularly liked Charles’s line about growing into his weight. The character does not intend this observation to be funny, but we laugh a little at his sweet naiveté, not because we find him ridiculous but because we find him endearing. For me, all the most genuine laughs came from moments like this, moments when the characters showed more of their innocence than they intended. I also loved the everyone’s reactions to Alice’s first stab at acting on the train platform. And Cary’s ongoing obsession with explosives—and others’ comments on it—made me laugh at several points during the movie.
One other amusing side note—Glynn Turman, the actor portraying Dr. Woodward, also played Billy’s science teacher in Gremlins. Realizing that made me smile.
Best Scene:
About halfway through the movie, just before the tipping point, Elle Fanning’s Alice comes knocking on Joe Lamb’s bedroom window. During her short visit, the two of them watch a reel of home movies featuring Joe as a young child in the company of his mother. Moved by the film reel and by Joe’s reaction to it, Alice makes a confession that both clarifies a key conflict in the story and reveals (among other things) the depth of her feelings for Joe. The choice to use a home movie to create this moment of empathy and shared pain seemed singularly appropriate. As I watched the movie reel, I asked myself, “Who is taking these movies?” We never see the person who is behind the camera, the person who always seems to cut to a close-up of Mrs. Lamb’s face. Up till this point, the movie has painstakingly shown us that much of the meaning of any film is deliberately engineered by the person behind the camera. J.J. Abrams gives us the example of amateur filmmaker Charles to show us how deliberately a movie is crafted. Joe watches the home movies thinking about his mother, but we, the audience, should also be thinking about what is going on behind the camera.
Best Surprise:
The group’s initial interaction with Dr. Woodward provided the first shock of the movie and made me jump. Based on the sounds I heard around me, I was not the only one. Another surprise, of a slightly different nature, is the delightful bit of entertainment (strangely satisfying) that we get on the left side of the screen as the credits begin to roll on the right.
Best Scene Visually:
The entire film is a visual feast, but I particularly loved the efficiency of the opening. The first scene contains no dialogue, but it tells us so much. In the second scene, we hear people talking inside a house and see a boy sitting outside on a swing in the snow. This boy, Joe Lamb, has not said a word. Yet when we see him, we understand his situation immediately. Less than five minutes into the movie, we have a good sense of the protagonist, inside and out. We also know the movie’s driving themes and plot elements. And as an added bonus, the color scheme of the boy in the snow is so arresting. This is good story telling, and it looks pretty, too.
The Performances:
The young actors carry this movie and deserve more praise than I can give them in a single review. The movie is well written and brilliantly executed, but without their gifted and winning performances, the film wouldn’t work.
Newcomer Joel Courtney is magnificent as Joe Lamb, the character through whom the audience experiences the movie. The best part about Courtney’s performance is that you don’t think about it. Watching him on screen, I didn’t ask myself, Who is that kid playing Joe? Instead I asked, What will Joe do now? How does [fill in the development] make Joe feel? Courtney was thoroughly convincing and charmingly understated.
Elle Fanning was more conspicuous as Alice Dainard, but that’s partially because she’s the most famous child actor in the cast. At first I thought she seemed a bit wooden (sullen for no reason) and that her acting in Charles’s film seemed even more wooden. When she suddenly began to perform so well in the zombie film, she surprised me just as much as the boys on the platform. And then as I learned more and more about Alice, I slowly began to realize that Fanning’s performance was just as revelatory. She wasn’t wooden at all. She was playing someone whose behavior perhaps seemed wooden from the outside, but on closer examination, Alice had plenty to be sullen about and abundant reasons to distance herself from other people emotionally.
Riley Griffiths as Charles the amateur filmmaker gave one of the strongest performances in the film. Not only was he likeable and amusing throughout, but he displayed compelling vulnerability and depth when bearing his soul to his friend Joe. At first, Charles seems a bit like another iteration of a character who often shows up in Steven Spielberg-related movies—Chunk in Goonies, Chowder in Monster House. He’s a bit overweight and very outspoken, at times annoying, a foil for the less obnoxious leading character. But Charles ultimately proves to be much more than these predecessors. He recognizes that he’s a foil for the leading character, and he resents it, deeply, bitterly. Charles is a very complex character, lovable, real, and Griffiths plays him beautifully, with tenderness and skill.
Ryan Lee as Cary, a kid obsessed with blowing things up is there mainly as comic relief (and also to blow things up). But he plays the roll so engagingly and memorably that he stands out a bit from the remaining kids in Charles’s crew, Zach Mills as Preston who operates the camera and (adorably) doesn’t want to die, and Gabriel Basso as Martin, the best actor of the fictional bunch and the lead of the film-within-a-film who is definitely not leading man material in his real life. Mills and Basso are very good, but Lee is far better and more memorable.
Kyle Chandler, star of the TV series Friday Night Lights plays Jackson Lamb, Joe’s father who throws himself into his work as deputy sheriff because he does not know what to do with his son. The character is likeable, and Chandler plays him well. Ron Eldard gives a surprisingly convincing performance as Louis Dainard. I’ve always found Eldard a pleasant actor, but not a powerful one, and this is one of the better performances of his career. Noah Emmerich makes a fittingly despicable Nelec. Dan Castellanetta (aka Homer Simpson) also shows up in a brief role, and I got a kick out of seeing David Gallagher, the kid from Seventh Heaven and Look Who’s Talking Now all grown up as drug dealing camera store worker Donny. Still, the clear standouts in the movie are the kids.
The Negatives:
[Vague spoilers; won’t spoil anything unless you watch the movie while thinking really hard about the review]
Something about the very last thing pulled toward the water tower bothered me. It seemed like the movie was reaching for greatness and falling a bit short. I thought of the ending of E.T., and I got what the movie was trying to do, trying to say, but I wasn’t sure that I completely believed it.
Also, though the ending did explain everything, it seemed a little abrupt to me. What happened when the credits rolled distracted me from that, but you watch the final scene of the movie itself feeling that a lot of loose ends need to be wrapped up. For one thing, the villain in the movie sort of conveniently vanished. Will another emerge? What is going to happen to the people in the town, particularly those who did not mind their own business? If this all happened in 1979, why doesn’t anybody know about it now? (I realize that the story is fictional, but I felt that it deliberately distracted the viewer from asking questions like these by presenting deliberately clever and satisfying credits.)
Overall:
Super 8 was a great movie, the best I’ve seen so far this year (which is not saying much; I’ve only seen a handful of films in the theater). As a summer blockbuster/popcorn flick it more than delivered. It deliberately evokes classic kid adventure films like Goonies and E.T., and I suspect that it may become similarly cherished in the future.