Super 8
The Spielberg effect
Rather more interesting than Super 8, the new J.J. Abrams movie, is the picture's backstory. As a kid in the mid-'70s, Abrams began shooting little films with a Super 8 camera, that highly portable, relatively inexpensive boon to aspiring young filmmakers. Later, in his mid-teens, Abrams and his friend Matt Reeves—a fellow budding director—entered some of their shorts in a Los Angeles Super 8 film festival. The L.A. Times did a story on them. Then—could they even have dreamed of this?—they got a call from Steven Spielberg's office, asking if they wanted to work on preserving some little films that Spielberg himself had shot as a kid, in the old Standard-8 format. Did they ever.
Thus we have Super 8, a fond remembrance of Spielberg classics like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind—of the director's sympathetic concern with the loneliness of childhood and his understanding way with misunderstood extraterrestrials. Surely it helped to have Spielberg himself onboard as a producer, contributing script assessment and sitting in on the edits. But Abrams, unfortunately, is not Spielberg. (Why should he be? Who else among mere mortals is?) And so his attempt to replicate the older director's magic inevitably falls short.
The movie's most engaging element is the group of adolescent cinephiles at the center of it—six kids dreaming big in small-town Ohio in 1979. Their leader, Charles (Riley Griffiths), has written a script for a Super 8 zombie movie and recruited his friends to help make it. Among his crew are teen angel Alice (Elle Fanning), cast as the film's love interest, and the introverted Joe (a striking performance by first-time actor Joel Courtney), who's been put in charge of makeup, sound, and effects. (This is a really low-budget production.) The kids are nicely individualized. Charles is a born director, obsessed with getting just the right shot and demanding real tears from his actors. Alice appreciates his project as an escape from her unhappy life with her single dad (Ron Eldard), the town drunk. And Joe remains committed to the film even though his world is in upheaval—he has just lost his mother in an accident, and is now making an uneasy adjustment to living with his distracted father (Kyle Chandler), the town's deputy sheriff.
It seems clear that Abrams drew on his own movie-making youth for this picture. One scene in particular—in which the kids are on location at a railroad station and a long train barrels by, wrecking the sound levels (Charles just orders the actors to talk louder)—has the vivid particularity of lived experience. And the scene in which Joe is applying makeup to Alice's face, and we see him falling helplessly in love with her, has a true Spielbergian glow.
It's too bad, then, that Super 8 is also a monster movie, with an angry outer-space behemoth—very slowly revealed—whose romper-stomper m.o. strongly recalls the towering beastie in Matt Reeves' Cloverfield. Here Abrams checks off a number of other Spielbergisms—model-making, electrical outages (complete with endangered lineman), obtuse grownups, and sinister military interlopers. There's also a fiery train wreck (overextended) and a school teacher (Glynn Turman) who knows what the rampant alien is up to. ("If we don't begin helping him," he tells the kids, "we will all pay the price.")
The film's disparate narrative elements never really mesh. The kids and their movie are more interesting than the monster, whose depredations are repetitive and whose familiarity short-circuits any intended horror. The picture could be a difficult sell after its opening weekend. The youthful sci-fi audience is unlikely to be all that scared, and older viewers—drawn by an attempt to reproduce the vintage Spielberg effect they remember from their own youth—may leave theaters with an enlarged appreciation of the man's induplicable wonders.
Kurt Loder is a writer living in New York. His third book, a collection of film reviews called The Good, the Bad and the Godawful, will be published in November by St. Martin's Press.