Film Review - Super 8

Super 8
Director: J.J. Abrams; Writer: J.J. Abrams
Paramount Pictures

This review will likely be on the short side, since it's been quite a while since I actually saw Super 8, but I feel like I owe the movie at least a little bit of my time since it was one of my favorite films of the summer. Every review of Super 8 is required to mention the debt it owes to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the oeuvre of Steven Spielberg, and with good reason - the movie looks and feels like a throwback to that era in a number of interesting ways. That being said, Super 8 is also unmistakably a J.J. Abrams flick, and the melding of the two styles works quite nicely, delivering a not-quite-transcendent but very compelling experience.

Set in small-town Ohio, Super 8 follows a group of youngsters putting together an amateur movie with Super 8 mm film (see what they did there!) who happen to witness a seemingly supernatural disaster. Super 8 often feels like a beautiful and earnest meditation on the community experience and the horrors and delights of childhood, wrapped up in the disguise of a sci-fi monster thriller. I was surprised to find myself so invested in the characters (a frequent pitfall of the sci-fi/horror genre), and I enjoyed the more quiet moments in the film where Abrams allows the audience to connect with the protagonists while slowly adding tension and suspense to the film's atmosphere. The actors, especially the young actors Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning, deserve a lot of credit for making the early stages of the movie so engaging - Fanning especially deserves praise for managing to portray a young girl with a difficult life while not seeming whiny or overacting. Abrams does just as interesting directorial work in establishing his small-town setting as he does in the more action-oriented sequences; the opening sequence is particularly moving and effective. Writing has never been Abrams' primary strength, but while Super 8 is not going to win any awards for its script, the dialogue for the most part feels natural and not too heavy-handed, even when dealing with some fairly overt themes.

Audiences looking for a straightforward monster movie or intricate sci-fi thriller may be somewhat disappointed by what they find in Super 8, and indeed my main issue with the movie was that the ultimate reveal and explanation of the mysterious happenstances was not all that original or exciting. Thankfully, Abrams is able to compensate for this weakness by drawing on the emotional core established in the characters - and by having shit blow up. Shit blowing up is usually pretty fun to watch. Still, I can't help but wish the movie was able to reconcile its different aspects a bit better than it does. Beneath all the thrills and explosions is a compelling story of growing up which manages to feel both whimsical and realistic, and harkens back to a style of filmmaking in an earnest and touching manner that does justice to the aforementioned Spielberg works.

Grade: A-