Super 8

Director J.J. Abrams's love letter to Steven Spielberg is yet another attempt to recapture what was great about the movies of the 1970s and '80s that almost entirely misses the point.  Produced by Spielberg himself, Super 8 tells the story of a bunch of kids who, while making a home movie, stumble on a sci-fi adventure that’s far more amazing than anything they’ve dreamed, or seen at the pictures.  The film strives for the emotional and cinematic grandeur of E.T., Close Encounters, and Jaws, but doesn’t even reach the entertainment value of Gremlins or The Goonies.  This is mainly because the young protagonists capture only the surface aspects of the characters Abrams is having them emulate, and because the director devotes way too much time to his computer-generated antagonist. 

While Spielberg’s best films have always reveled in cinematic spectacle, they were, at their core, human dramas that played on an intimate emotional scale. With the exception of Elle Fanning, who is an amazing screen presence and has two astounding scenes in the picture, the kids in this movie don’t come off very credibly.  They just don’t fit in the suburban '80s setting they're meant to inhabit.  The film nails the period props and costumes; the color of the Super 8 film wrappers and the sounds of the cameras and projectors are certainly evocative to a guy like me who used all that stuff as a kid, but these details don’t add up to real authenticity.  Rather than recreating a specific period in time, the movie feels like kids and filmmakers playing dress-up.

After a few strong scenes early in the film with a few of the young actors, we are subjected to what feels intended to be the greatest train crash in movie history, but actually feels nothing like an actual train crash.  From that moment on, the film is an endless chase with a thoroughly uninteresting alien monster, which is a huge missed opportunity.  There are already far too many movies about alien monsters on the loose, but no major film has explored the world of kids making their own movies, which is now so common it's nearly a childhood rite of passage.

One high note: during the end credits, we get to see some of the Super-8 movie the kids shoot during the first half of the film and it looks perfectly accurate.  But why did Abrams save this stuff for a cool end credit sequence, when it would have been far more interesting as part of the main story?  Unfortunately, this film’s title and inspiration are only jumping-off points for a conventional and disappointing modern summer action movie.