At Home: Super 8

Stop talking about production value, the Air Force is going to kill us.

I enjoyed Super 8 when I saw it back in August but I had a few problems with it: notably that monster. It felt estranged from the plot of the film and never felt fully integrate. Re-watching it hasn’t resolved that issue but it less bothersome than it was before. Super 8 isn’t a great movie. It’s a little too self-referential and seems to be a little confused in tying all its emotional strands together but it’s a genial kind of film and in JJ Abrams it has a director with visual flair (and lens flare). It may not always work, but it does work more often than it doesn’t.

Borrowing wholesale from Spielberg’s early 80s output, Super 8 tells a story about Joel Courtney’s Joe, son of the deputy sheriff (Kyle Chandler) and on the receiving end of a tragedy when his mother dies in a horrible accident at the nearby metal plant. The film picks the story up a few months later and Joe’s shooting a super 8 movie with his friends. One night they witness a train crash and find out that it wasn’t an accident. People start to disappear and strange occurrences plague the town as they try to uncover the truth as to what’s really going on.

Like a lot of Spielberg’s work it’s about grief, absent/estranged fathers, a distrust of authority with a touch of the fantastical but I’m not sure the film knows how to put all these elements together to synthesise an emotional ending. Without spoiling it, there’s a specific emotional beat (concerning a locket) at the end that I’m not sure has anything to do ‘alien’ subplot in the film and yet the two are intertwined. The moment certainly apes the more saccharine moments from ET but I’m not sure there’s much meaning behind it.

However, like a lot of Abram’s films, there’s a snappiness to the editing, some funny dialogue (“I know that you don’t like me and I’m sorry about that”) and there’s a great sense of chemistry amongst the cast. (The kids are terrific, Elle Fanning is the standout.) His mystery box method of telling a story sucks when it comes to revelations but everything leading up to that moment is engaging. The characters are earnest and endearing and going back to Spielberg, Abram’s realises that what sells a film’s milieu is a sense of community and Super 8 creates a convincing one.

It’s when the monster appears and the mystery is revealed that things start to drift a little. What Super 8 was good at in the first-half (its relationships), it ditches for most of the climax which is not unexpected but it is a little disappointing. The visual effects for the monster look, for a lack of a better word, jammy and the father/son, father/daughter drama that drove the early parts of the film is not resolved in an adequate manner; just sort of assumed to be resolved.

So Super 8 straddles the line of being not-quite-Spielberg but is good in its own right. It could have been a belter had it managed to figure why it was doing things instead of just doing them but it’s a solid film.

7/10

Song of the week: “Neighbourhood watch – Fail” Super 8

In Cinemas: Super 8

If you speak of this, you and your parents will be killed.

Not really a review as such, just some thoughts on…J.J. Abrams Super 8. There be spoilers ahead.

I wasn’t sure what to think of Super 8 in the weeks and months leading up to its release. The Spielberg tangent and mystery surrounding the film left me cold. So, turning up at the cinema, miffed that the film was only showing during peak hours (grrr, and I forgot my Odeon Premiere card), I sat down expecting everything and nothing, while also wondering how many more times I’ll have to suffer that infernal Orange Potiche advert (many more, it seems).

Annnnnnnd….I liked what I saw, even when the explosions came I was still interested. I liked that it focused on cementing its dramatic elements first, almost to the film’s detriment as when proceedings went explodey – boom I was half-disappointed with the course it took. It wasn’t a cop-out by Abrams to deliver a propulsive action sequence you’d expect in a more action-orientated blockbuster (the train crash near the start served up enough of that), but I was hoping the film would find a more involving way of tying up its loose ends rather than laying waste to the small town of Lillian.

What disappointed the most was the alien; the design was uninteresting, like a continuation of the designs used for Cloverfield and Star Trek. The texture of the skin and dimly-lit environments did not help matters. That could be down to the budget or execution (probably both). The end result was a very underwhelming alien/monster.

But I really enjoyed this film; it’s a throwback to the films my youth and its set in the late 70s, early 80s, a period I’m fascinated by. Unlike the caricatures we’ve had to endure in Transformers: Dark of the Moon or the shallow, empty characters that populated Green Lantern, the kids in this film are terrific. They all had distinct, enjoyable personalities. They’re a tight knit bunch of friends; they have chemistry with each other and the way they interact puts the film heads and shoulders above some others I’ve seen this summer.

I also like how the film isn’t upfront about the tension between Kyle Chandler’s Deputy and Ron Eldard drunken failure of a father. It simmers and it reminded me of when I was a kid and you saw grown-ups acting in a certain manner. You had an inkling of what was going on but never really knew unless you stumped up the courage to ask. The relationship between Joel Courtney’s Joe and Elle Fanning’s Alice feels natural and the performances are good, especially Courtney who’s wonderful in that sort of nervous, uncomfortably understated way. The mystery element is fine but the payoff isn’t, it doesn’t take much away from my enjoyment but if Abrams had made a memorable monster, Super 8 would have been close to being excellent. I think it can settle for being very good.

My last thought is on the Spielberg connection. Its not difficult to see the hallmarks of Spielberg’s early career (the embattled Deputy, sense of community, suspicion of authority, family, issues with fathers etc, etc) and I like it even if its not as impactful as when I first saw Spielberg do it all those years ago. It’s an imitation, a loving one in my eyes that can’t quite reach the emotional climax it needs to because one, I’ve seen it before and two it’ll never be as good as that first time. It just can’t be.

Oh and on a final note, I like lens flare. I like it very much.

8/10

Quote of the week – Super 8

This following is just a sentence or a word that stood out from any film I saw during the week, the first post of this kind is Super 8 and there was one moment that had me chuckling to myself when [spoiler] Joe rescues Elle Fanning’s Alice by waking her up through a slap to the face [end spoiler] and says -

“I’ just doing the best I can to save you”

That line puts a smile on my face

Thoughts on the Super Bowl Trailers

I’m not much of American football fan myself, living in the UK we don’t get a lot of coverage on the NFL so the American Football (or Hand-egg) is usually out of sight, out of mind. That is until the Super Bowl rolls around and we’re inundated with reports on THE GREATEST SPORTING EVENT IN THE WORLD (/sarcasm). It gets even worse as since I live in the UK all those trailers that studios pay through the nose to get on air aren’t even available for me to see til the next day. All the glamour and glitz of the Super Bowl is lost in me as I struggle to figure whose who and why play consistently stops every thirty seconds, disappears for a minute, comes back for ten seconds and so on…

Anyhoo, the trailers, most of which run for thirty seconds, a few one minute spots and they usually represent films coming out in the Summer; setting down a marker for possible definite blockbusters that will occupy our screens for the duration of the summer. For my thoughts, read on…