Have you ever anxiously taken a bite out of your favorite food, say pizza, cake, ice cream, buffalo wings, or whatever floats your boat (and if it's not one of the aforementioned foods, you're a terrible excuse for a human being, just so you know), and half-way through chewing, stopped dead in your tracks. Your face takes on a terrible expression that would undoubtedly frighten any passersby and your heart flutters a bit, possibly skipping a beat. "What the hell did I just take a bite out of". You looked at the food before you took a bite and it looked the same as always, smelled the same as always, felt the same as always, so why doesn't it taste the same as always? It might not even necessarily taste terrible, just different, definitely not what you were expecting (which is the cause of the shock). Now, I'm about as far from a cook as humanly possible, so I'm not going to begin to pretend that I know what the difference is between the "usual" and "flawed", but presumably the ingredients are pretty much the same in both the "good" batch and the "bad" batch. It's likely just slight differences in mixture that, to the particular taste of human beings, make a world of difference. Which finally brings me around to the purpose of this article, J.J. Abrams'"Super 8".
The third film in the Abrams' filmography (his previous two directorial efforts being "Mission: Impossible III" and "Star Trek", which I appreciated and loved, respectively) and the first film not draw its heritage from the baby-boomer television era, "Super 8", in an original story written solely by Mr. Abrams himself, tells the story of a group of pre-teen kids who accidently thrust themselves into a top secret military (air force if you want to get technical) conspiracy when they witness a truck derail a train while filming their own Super 8 zombie film. Unbeknownst to them, the wrecked train caries some very dangerous cargo which goes MIA as soon as it gets its chance to escape. While the kids don't know exactly what's going on, they are warned that something ominous is occurring when the man in the truck that derailed the train (he miraculously survives a direct collision with a train!), who happens to be their science teacher, warns them that if they tell anybody about what they've seen, "they'll kill you and your parents". Needless to say, the kids prefer not to be orphans, so they try putting the incident behind them, but when inexplicably weird events begin to occur all across town, their curiosity gets the better of them and they are set forth on adventure where only they can save the day (surprise, surprise).
As I alluded to in the opening, while the film contains good elements here and there (borrowed from many predecessors of the genre), it never finds the right mixture of the different elements (or even the right pacing between them for that matter). Particularly, the film never decides if it is a coming-of-age story, a la Spielberg's (an executive producer of the film) "E.T.", or Byron Haskin's adaptation of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" (1953). It might even be possible to successfully mix the two elements, but the film still needs an ultimate core, and instead Abrams' hedges his bets, refusing to come down on one side or the other. My guess is he was trying to capture the best of both worlds, but by getting greedy, the result is a middling pile of mush. It's a nice attempt, but try as it might, the film just can't find solid footing.
Now had it been me (not to presume I would have done any better, although that's pretty much in the definition of critique), I would have come down on the side of telling the story completely through the kids' perspective, forgoing the typical "sci-fi movie monster" angle. And when I say forgo, I don't mean they needed to cut out the monster all together (although I would have cut out the CGI rendering of it completely), but rather cut out all the scenes involving the monster without the kids. Scenes illustrating the monster hurting people we know little of and care nothing about (how many of these scenes appear in Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" for instance?), gone. Scenes of adults slowly uncovering the "mystery", deleted. Scenes of evil, shady air force officer's maliciously covering their tracks and keeping the town's people in the dark, get the hell out of here and don't come back (notice how we don't know any of the names of the evil scientists and policemen in "E.T."). These are all remnants of 1950's Sci-Fi B-movies that both Lucas and Spielberg wisely discarded in the 1970's, and in my opinion, they need never come back.
It's not all bad though, as"Super 8" does shine in spots (which makes it's lack of cohesion all the more frustrating). The film is at it's best when dealing with the children and the world of Super 8 filmmaking. Abrahms manages to draw out effective performances from his young cast, and while a few of the characters feel like rehashed stereo-types (a fat bossy kid and small crazy kid that likes to blow stuff up were a little too familiar), for the most part the performances felt genuine and unmannered. In particular, the performances from the two leads, Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning (Dakota's younger sister), are strong and keep the audience engaged more than anything else. The movie does add a pointless "Romeo and Juliet" style feud between both kids' fathers that makes the budding relationship between the two more difficult (as if an alien infestation wasn't bad enough), which actually weaken the whole storyline, but the kids mostly manage to come the overwrought nature of this dramatic twist.
My favorite part of the film though is the sort of "inside baseball" look at the world of children's Super 8 shorts. What makes this part of the film especially interesting is it comes from personal knowledge, as J.J. Abrams was quite the prolific Super 8 filmmaker as a child (and even got the opportunity to restore Spielberg's childhood Super 8 film's after Spielberg's assistant saw Abrams' name in an article about child filmmakers). To see the excitement and earnestness with which the kids make their half-baked, very low budget zombie film is quite the treat, and at the end of the film, as the credits role, we even get to see the finished product, which is actually fairly impressive (I actually enjoyed it more than the film). It made me wish for a comedy or documentary solely about kids making Super 8 films, but now I'm starting to get off topic now.
Before I wrap up, I feel I must say (as a sort of disclaimer) that I had pretty high expectations for the film going into it. I included "Super 8" in my "Top 5 Anticipated of 2011" (which if you missed you can catch up with by clicking
here), and given that I was pleasantly surprised by J.J. Abrams two previous films, I was really hoping that "Super 8" would be his breakout "auteur" statement that a new director in the Sci-Fi genre had arrived, and this is was not. There is still a lot of potential though and I still look forward to seeing what Mr. Abrams does in the future, and if you're desperate to see a movie this summer, I'm sure it is still better than the endless sequels and superhero movies we have been infected with.
Rating:
6/10
Christopher Lominac
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