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Super 8

★★★☆☆

Directed by: J.J. Abrams

Written by: J.J. Abrams

My initial impression of Super 8, J.J. Abrams’s celluloid love letter to Steven Spielberg, was that it was pretty great. But something occurred since the close of the credits and my attempt here to distill my opinion into a few paragraphs of review; something fairly unusual for me: My opinion changed. Not so far that I went from being very enthusiastic about it to hating it, but free of the nostalgic warm fuzzies immediately during and after, the ultimately low-stakes plot and deliberate pace made the movie forgettable, drifting out of my memory readily within hours.

The film follows a group of young teenagers who are trying to film a zombie movie under the direction of Charles. His friend, Joe, is a quiet boy who we learn in the film’s opening scene has recently lost his mother to a tragic factory accident, leaving him under the care of his busy and detached father, who is also the local sheriff. While filming a scene near the railroad tracks, the group witnesses a train crash, caused by a desperate man driving a truck. Meanwhile, their camera captures what appears to be some kind of creature escaping from the wreckage. The military muscle their way into to the train accident, but strange occurrences begin to build up and people start disappearing until finally the kids must try to use their knowledge to understand the threat and, if possible, stop it.

On the positive side, the young actors that are the principals are good (Joel Courtney as Joe, Riley Griffiths as Charles) to downright excellent (Elle Fanning as the love interest, Alice, who has a connection to Joe outside the film project) and the special effects are mostly superb as well. The plot isn’t terribly original but it unfolds in a satisfying way and there are enough nods and thematic similarities to kid-adventure movies from the 80s like E.T. and The Goonies to carry it through.

However, there are some issues, too. For one thing, Super 8 has a surprisingly slow burn, with a lot of unnecessary scenes and extended sequences that seem, at the time, to ratchet up the tension. But for all this creeping menace and character development, it doesn’t really amount to much. There’s a halfhearted affection triangle between Joe, Charles and Alice; a lot is made of the divide between Joe and his dad but it kind of seems like the Sheriff’s distance from his son is partially what enables the inevitable reconciliation; the alien/monster is missing from large stretches of the film and the movie’s central antagonist, Air Force officer Nelec (played with scowly enigma by Noah Emmerich) lack sufficient menace to even stop a bunch of junior high kids from breaking martial law. Certain sections of the film, like the train wreck, are deliriously over the top, in a bad way. The biggest issue is that when the reveal finally comes and the audience understands what’s been going on, the answer to all the questions is sort of interesting but doesn’t have enough emotional hook left to leave a mark on anyone.

It’s hard when thinking about this film to not recall another J.J. Abrams near-hit: Cloverfield. In that movie, we had too much set-up, a sort of dicey conceit and then a really solid long stretch of excitement before the thing unraveled by revealing too much at the end, most of which wasn’t necessary anyway. Here, we have a lot of set-up (though it works better in this case), a solid conceit and then a long stretch of quasi-exciting build up before too much is revealed. At least the answers provided here are welcome at the surface, but their nature deflates what little tension had been carefully built to that point. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good description of Lost (another Abrams project). The trend I’m starting to see (going back to Alias) is that Abrams is great with the ideas, he’s a solid filmmaker and storyteller but he lacks the punch to payoff his introductory ideas. Who knows, maybe he needs to try working from a darker place or starting at the end and back filling to the beginning or something. But he’s starting to frustrate me by creating awesome set-ups that don’t ever quite live up to early promises.

And that’s really why Super 8 faded for me after the initial high of watching wore off. Like Alias and Lost and Cloverfield there is a certain visceral enthusiasm he is able to effortlessly create, but when it’s over, there is a sense that it has been a lot of smoke and mirrors; that there was just a man behind the curtain cashing in on conceptual currency instead of truly delivering on the investment the audience has made. In this case, it’s not a bad final product, just one that fails to stay with you. For all the rest of the borrowing done from E.T. here, that’s the one part that mattered the most.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — February 27, 2012 at 10:54AM