Super 8

Super 8

OOO1/2 

PG-13-for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence and some drug use.

You know you're getting old when the years you spent in junior high serve as the nostalgic back drop for a summer movie.  Super 8, the new sci-fi / monster block buster, written and directed by J.J. Abrams, follows the adventures of six middle schoolers during the summer of 1979, and gets some things right, even if the ending is all wrong.

In general, I don't think of the late 1970's as a carefree, innocent time, the mood often being invoked when a movie is set in the distant, or even not so distant, past, with preteens taking the central roles.  Abrams does give a nod to Cold War anxieties and hints at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant accident that happened in the spring of that year, but he misses that it was a time of economic recession and general malaise in the country.  There was a feeling at the time that the U.S.'s best days were in the past.  A movie that projected this mood much better was 2004's Miracle, about the 1980 U.S. Gold Metal winning hockey team.  Abrams gets many of the pop culture references right, but I have a feeling he was shy about inviting comparisons between that economically troubled age and our own.

But placing the movie in the era of analogue does give it a great advantage in telling it's story, since it forces the characters live with a bit of uncertainty.  There is no internet to get information from.  There are no digital cameras that give instant playback (they actually have to wait three days to get film developed; a rush order at that) and there are no cell phones for instant communication.  They are driving blind with the high tech tools of 1979 at their disposal, that to us look pretty ancient.

The movie opens at the funeral repast of the mother of one of a gang of amateur film makers, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney).  The boy has a poor relationship with his deputy sheriff father (Kyle Chandler), and the neighbors wonder how the two will cope with their new reality.  Four months later, as summer vacation begins, the two disagree over how the next couple of months should be spent; Joe wants to stay home to help his friend finish his home made zombie movie, shot with, you got it, super 8 mm film, while his father wants him to go to baseball camp. That night he sneaks out with his friends to film a scene for the movie at an abandoned train station.  They are driven there by Alice (Elle Fanning, Dakota's younger sister), who has taken her father's car.  While filming the scene there is a horrific train crash, instigated by a mysterious white pickup that drives onto the tracks.  This sets off a series of strange events; runaway pets, vanishing power lines, a rash of stolen small appliances and car motors, disappearing town's people and the immediate descent upon the small hamlet of the U.S. Air Force.

That's about all I'm going to give away about the story mainly because, even though its a pretty standard sci-fi plot, it is allowed to unfold slowly, which makes just about any detail I might reveal a bit of a spoiler.  That is what I really liked about the movie; the viewer is discovering things along with the characters, who are allowed time to get to know each other and themselves.  There is plenty of over the top, bordering on ridiculous, action you would expect from a summer pop corn movie, but there are also quiet moments that make the kids more than just avatars in a video game, but real people.  They're actually written like middle school kids.  Many times teenage or preteen characters are written like young adults, only more obnoxiously and with greater sophistication than the grown-ups.  In Super 8 they are given all the awkward, inadequate, overly emotional and inarticulate mannerisms that comes with the age.  They are not stupid; their feelings are real, but they are still figuring out the right way to express them. 

As I wrote, the film reveals its mysteries slowly.  These quiet moments are used for character development and exposition, the part of a movie where the action stops and needed background is given, in many movies by way of artificial and awkward speeches given by one of the players. Here the exposition is blended in naturally and seems to be a part of the narrative as opposed to an annoying, if necessary, pit stop to give information that the audience needs to keep the story making sense. 

I have gone all this way, and have not mentioned that Abrams, who produced the monster movie Cloverfield (2008) and directed the Star Trek reboot (2009), is paying homage to the early block busters of Steven Spielberg, and he has taken some heat to not simply honoring, but downright plagiarizing his hero. Spielberg is one of the producers, so I don't think he has to worry about being sued.  Yes, Abrams investigates themes familiar to Spielberg's 70's and 80's movies; young kids dealing with the loss of a parent either through divorce or death, misunderstanding adults, suspicious government agents, an unseen monster, and  an alien trying to get home, placed in a suburban setting.  I don't share in the plagiarism charge, or at least don't take it seriously, mainly because it's impossible to make a movie of this kind without cribbing from Spielberg, the man who, along with George Lucus, created the modern summer blockbuster.  Besides, he said that this is what he was going to do, and by gum he did it, and did it well. 

There are really three movies that Super 8 draws from; E.T., Jaws and Jurassic Park, with maybe a dash of Close Encounters.  The monster is a menacing enigma who's identity is uncovered in stages, much like the shark in Jaws, which was a good touch.  My problem is that they want it both ways; they give the intense menace of Jaws or of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park but with the feel-good ending of E.T.  There has been a trend in Hollywood over the last twenty years of not wanting to make villains from any identifiable ethic or racial group, unless they are blonde  haired, blue eyed Aryans.  The makers of 2002's Sum of all Fears were so nervous about upsetting Arab and Muslim groups that they changed the bad guys from Islamic terrorists to European Neo-Nazis (yeah, there's a real topical threat to world security; a couple of ninety year old cranks confined to an oxygen tent in a Buenos Aires nursing home).   Now it seems they're even afraid to make a mythic creature into a villain.  I could have bought the ending if they had stopped short on the level of villainy the creature is capable of.

My only other criticism, and this is a trifle I admit, is that the movie takes place in a fictional central Ohio town and I knew as I was watching it, from my four years in the Buckeye State, that the place was simply too hilly to be anywhere near Dayton.  And indeed, as I found out later, it was filmed in West Virginia.

So, yes, a recommendation from me.  It will be a bit too intense for younger kids, and there is a use of strong language that seemed unnecessary.  I'm not naive, I was roughly the main character's age in 1979, I know we sometimes used "naughty words" in a misguided attempt to make ourselves feel older and sophisticated.  Here it just seemed to be thrown in arbitrarily.