Super 8 is an effects-heavy monster movie, a highly anticipated summer blockbuster and a fiercely marketed tent pole film. Most of these kinds of movies nowadays are nothing special, from the mixed Cloverfield to the doldrums of Avatar and Transformers. But is Super 8 any good?
Super 8 is set in a small town in Ohio in 1979 and follows four school kids as they try to make a zombie movie called “The Case” with a Super 8 camera for which Joe (Joel Courtney) does make-up. Joe has recently lost his mother in a factory accident and is still grieving. The arrival of Alice (Elle Fanning), who acts in their film, makes things more difficult for Joe. As Joe falls for her, his dad Jackson (Kyle Chandler) tries to put an end to their friendship because of a family feud. While shooting a scene for their film on an empty railway station late at night, the five kids witness a horrible accident that seems to have unleashed a strange creature into the surrounding area. As their small town to torn apart by panic, will the kids ever finish their movie?
Super 8, though directed by J.J. Abrams (who, with Mission: Impossible III and the most recent Star Trek film, is a popular director in his own right), is a tribute to the films of Steven Spielberg, particularly his work from the Seventies and Eighties and most noticeably Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. However, the film does feel somewhat fresh, particularly in the scenes that focus on the five kids and the making of their film. These kids, no matter how the degree of characterization between them varies, are fun to watch and there are a few good laughs from their constant put-downs and their Ed Wood-like filming style. The film moves at an easy pace and allows time for the characters to become lodged in your mind.
When the pyrotechnics kick in, they manage to be quite exciting, although this may be as much for their slow build-up and brevity than anything else. The pickup truck/ train crash is suitably exciting and convincing in a way that many recent computer-generated action set pieces have not been. The fact that no one is killed is, in a way, part of the fun (it is a film that knows it is silly, without parading the fact like the recent grindhouse-style endurance tests). The monster itself is left unseen until the film’s end as Abrams puts his faith on suggestion until the final reveal, not unlike Jaws. Though the monster, when it is revealed, isn’t particularly convincing, the rest of the film benefits from what isn’t shown.
However, the film is overlong for the quality of its material, which can’t sustain 112 minutes. It is a minor criticism, though the post-credits sequence in which we see “The Case” is symptomatic of the film’s problem – it is cute and intermittently funny but long drawn out and frequently redundant.
Although its length mars the film, there are still a lot of things to enjoy in Super 8. For one thing, the performances of the five kids are all fantastic, particularly Courtney and Fanning, who manage to carry the film. Ultimately, the film is light entertainment and quite a bit of fun, though when it does deal with darker issues like grief, it does so with respect and sincerity. Though the ending is sentimental and tacky, it would have been missed had the film ended differently. All in all, Super 8 is good entertainment and quite a bit of fun. If summer blockbusters were more like this and less like Transformers, the summer wouldn’t be such a bad time to go to the movies.
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