It’s obviously unfair to criticize a film for making different creative choices than you would have liked for it to, but in the case of Super 8, it’s a taller order than usual. J.J. Abrams’s latest is a deliberate homage to the small-town fantasies of Steven Spielberg’s early career, but in its attempts to flesh out the story beyond just majestic sunsets and absent fathers, it often threatens to go into uncharted territory far more compelling than anywhere it finally decides to go. What ends up on screen is certainly elaborately realized, but more often than not, it seems that Abrams was afraid to out-Spielberg Spielberg.
Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) loses his mother in the opening shots of Super 8, and is left with his father (Kyle Chandler), the town deputy, and a motley group of friends who are hard at work on a zombie film called The Case. His father is clearly unsure of himself as both a leader and a parent, so Joe invests more and more of himself into the movie, for which he does sound, lights, and makeup. This investment is overturned by two concurrent events: the addition to the cast of Alice Daynard (Elle Fanning), whose father is at least partially responsible for his mother’s death, and the crash of a freight train just outside of town, which the Air Force immediately tries to cover up as best as it can.
When Super 8 allows its child stars to interact with each other, it achieves a sublimity that few summer movies can ever hope to grace. Together, they naturally evoke all of the opposing instincts of childhood without ever seeming to be aware of the contradictions: they are loyal while being self-interested, emotional while still trying to look cool, and entirely serious while making a short film in which the villainous corporation is named Romero Chemicals. Even better, they grasp perfectly the chaos and shifting hierarchy that occurs when a girl is thrown into a previously all-male clique.
Unfortunately, that’s relatively little of the film, or seems to be in comparison to long stretches when the military is quarantining the town, or Joe is trying to find ways to reconcile with his dad. None of these scenes are outright bad, but even the threat of death by alien here lacks the dramatic urgency of scenes where friendships are on the line, or where subordinates start to question whether or not they should really be so devoted to a director who is so unwilling to give up any creative control over the film. There’ll be more towns for them to move to once this one is destroyed, but the number of summers that they’ll have to make movies together is scarily finite.
In the mid 1980s, several middle-schoolers in Mississippi took it upon themselves to entirely remake Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the final result is one of the greats of underground video, simply because the danger and romance are that much more palpably real. At its best, Super 8 recalls that excitement, but couches in too many narrative threads that ultimately feel like unnecessary framing devices. The military, the strained father-son relationships, and even the dead mother all seem expendable considering that they could have made more room for these kids just figuring out what to do with this alien. In some of the wittier scenes, the children utilize the chaos going on around them as a backdrop for their film; this could have been a feature film unto itself, and one that did not so frustratingly evoke Abrams’s own Cloverfield.
Spielberg (credited here as a producer) spent a good deal of his career evoking the media of his youth, so it’s really no surprise that his own protégés would hope to do the same. But there’s a cult around Spielberg that lingers in film schools to this day, which reflects the mania and pathos in his work as well as the nostalgia. Had Abrams allowed the kids to act more cynically or independently, he might have achieved something really notable: the final word on Spielberg as a director. As is, he has achieved his mentor's technical mastery, but proved unable to do what Spielberg finally did: grow up.
SPECIAL FEATURES
The film features an audio commentary from writer/director Abrams, cinematographer Larry Fong, and producer Bryan Burk. There are also a total of eight featurettes devoted to the technical production of the film, a self-guided look at the train crash, and 14 deleted scenes from the film.
"Super 8" is on sale November 22, 2011 and is rated PG13. Action, Adventure. Directed by JJ Abrams. Written by J.J. Abrams. Starring Elle Fanning, Gabriel Basso, Joel Courtney, Kyle Chandler, Noah Emmerich, Riley Griffiths, Ron Eldard, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills.
