SUPER 8 Review

Unlike the kid leads of the new J.J. Abrams film "Super 8", I wasn't fourteen years old in the late 1970s, but I was maybe halfway there. Consequently, I didn't shoot my geeky homemade movies on Super 8 film. I got started in 1985, shooting on the glorious, short-lived Betamax video format. Working on videotape meant that I fell just short of participating in the Forrest J. Ackerman-inspired golden era of Famous Monsters fans making their down and gritty genre films in the backyard. Youthful aspiring pro filmmakers such as Don Glut would rally their fellow neighbor kids to make movies whenever they could, often times participating in a contest of some sort. For me, there were no contests, but the effort was no less serious. Every weekend and after school, whenever possible, friends would be gathered and we'd be shooting everything from alien invasions to zombies to cop movies.

Based on the very personal feel of "Super 8", my guess would be that Abrams shared this experience. When you're a fourteen-year-old filmmaker, virtually no force on earth can get you to put the camera down. That is, no force beyond ones own gender pool. Once girls entered the picture, our whole filmmaking world came quickly crashing down. Scriptwriting flirtations with love relationships and hinted-at passions were a quick but brief last gasp before actual flirtations and dating derailed the whole operation. For the budding adolescent filmmaker, conflicting inner-priorities can evoke a war zone of emotions and priorities. Abrams actualizes all of this quite wonderfully in "Super 8", an otherwise distractingly Spielbergian homage depicting that wondrous time in the life of a boy movie-maker when the camera was still firmly in-hand, monsters and aliens still very much filling the viewfinder, but that pretty girl from nearby is beginning to occupy his peripheral vision.

Maybe it's obvious by now, with my own life experience and continuing filmic passion, that I'm essentially the exact target audience for "Super 8". Factor in that I've been a fan of numerous other Abrams film and television projects ("Lost" ranks high on my list of all-time greatest TV shows, and his "Star Trek" reboot was my number one film of 2009), and you may correctly surmise that I went into "Super 8" with very high hopes. These hopes were, for the most part, met. But not quite. The film, in good part, communicates the spark of adolescent moviemaking, just as it also delivers the goods in being a big-budget creature feature. It's just that in it's overbearing attempt to evoke another director, he's missed out on what that particular director does so well: Magic.

Backtracking just a little bit, "Super 8", taking place convincingly in the late 1970s, is the story of a group of boys - and the one token girl, who enters the picture and rocks their world - working hard to complete their zombie movie, in hopes of winning the latest all-important homemade filmmaking contest. It's all-important to the zombie film's director, anyhow - a pudgy kid named Charles (Riley Griffiths) who clearly runs the show. Charles' good friend and resident gore effects expert, Joe (Joel Courtney), has recently lost his mother in a bad job-related accident, and is wrestling with grief. Amid all of this, Charles' singular directorial drive, obviously intersecting with his emerging libido, leads him to talk Alice (Elle Fanning), a pretty and talented young girl, into playing the thankless wife role in his latest epic. She complies - and subsequently strikes up an affinity for Joe.

But before that relationship begins to bud, the kids experience (and somehow miraculously survive) the biggest, most chaotic, most prolonged train wreck in movie history. The train was carrying some super-secret cargo, and before long, the small town is crawling with insufferable and well-armed Air Force personal. Something BIG is clearly going on, and of course the kids get caught up in the very thick of it. The adventure that follows, while nothing we haven't seen before in other movies, is thoroughly exciting and sufficiently engaging.

Abrams wisely avoids what could easily be a major disconnect with mainstream audiences by making the average every-kid Joe the main character rather than Charles the film director. Likewise, on the surface, "Super 8" is a story about managing grief, when in actuality, it is considerably more about navigating the shifting priorities of adolescence (as detailed above).

The film's marketing angle, presenting it more or less as a lost Spielberg film from the late seventies is not entirely off base, as Abrams heavily cops Spielberg's recognizable style more-so than Brian De Palma ever copped Alfred Hitchcock. Low angle tracking shots and medium close-ups of single characters starring up in awe while illuminated from above are the order of the day, all of it playing out in the lily-white American suburbs. "Super 8" was clearly made with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T." in mind, with the more threatening "Jaws" and "Jurassic Park" looming to a lesser degree. All of that said, "Super 8" falls short of delivering that final-reel magic that his inspiration (and producer on this project) Spielberg excels at. Perhaps it's the lack of a moving John Williams score; perhaps it's something else. But whatever the case, "Super 8", while perfectly fine in other respects, is not the Spielbergian home run that I for one was hoping for.

The acting by the young cast is to be commended, as is Abrams' terrific pacing. Other aspects may seem run-of-the-mill, but the fact of the matter is that "Super 8" is almost everything we hope to find in a big summer popcorn movie. Like "Inception" last summer, it gets bonus points for getting made at all, being a non-sequel/non-franchise labor of love, originating from the heart of its maker. But unlike that film, "Super 8" answers every question about itself and then some by the time the closing credits have rolled, right down to "Did they finish their zombie movie? How did that turn out?" Unlike, say, "Lost", everything is settled by the time it's over, and the mystery of it all, so prominent in the ad campaign, is thoroughly behind us. In that way, it's the anti-"Inception".

As I mentioned before, my hopes for this film were met, for the most part. But it is lacking just enough to fall short of greatness. But then, it's not right to fault a perfectly decent film for not being as great as "Lost" or "Star Trek". For the limited number of those of us in the audience who spent our childhoods running around with movie cameras in hand (and the even more limited number of us who still do as adults), "Super 8" will strike a rare chord. The broad Spielbergian magic that Abrams dresses his movie up in, however, is a case of "close but no cigar". Hopefully for his next outing, Abrams can pony up his own style, and wow us anew.

- Jim Tudor