Super 8 is a movie about movies, a movie in love with the past. It’s a séance that tries to summon the ghosts of American popular cinema in order to pay tribute to them, to tell them that, at least as far as director JJ Abrams is concerned, they will never be forgotten.
Cold War sci-fi from the Fifties; George Romero zombie flicks; Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind; the huge shadow archive of scratchy, homemade pictures created by cine-enthusiasts who dreamed of being of Romero and Spielberg: Super 8 is the sweetest film of 2011, an affectionate shout-out to amateurs everywhere.
The year is 1979, the setting small-town Ohio, and the mood one of anxiety. Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is a young teenager who’s struggling to deal with the sudden death of his mother in a factory accident. His father Jack (Kyle Chandler), the local deputy sheriff, can’t understand why the boy spends all his time making backyard movies and wants to send him off to summer camp. Worse still, he’s very much taken with Alice (Elle Fanning), older than him and co-star of the zombie picture he’s making with porky Charles (Riley Griffiths).
One night, while he and his friends are shooting a romantic scene at a railway station, they witness – and accidentally film – an explosive accident that turns out to have been caused by their science teacher (Glynn Turman). Soon the US Air Force, led by cold, arrogant Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich), arrives on the scene hell-bent not so much on finding out what has happened as on organising a massive cover-up that leads them to evacuate half the town. Fired by enthusiasm, curiosity and a sense of adventure, it’s only the teenagers – now half-fugitives and half-detectives – who can get to the bottom of this mystery.
Part of the charm of Super 8, and this will surely be palpable even for filmgoers born in the Eighties and Nineties, is its precise evocation of analogue life in the Seventies. By today’s standards, the equipment that the backyard auteurs use is crude and unwieldy. The footage they capture is extraordinary, plot-defining – yet they have to wait for it to be developed.
We’re meant to infer that making and sharing art is difficult, and that isn’t always a bad thing. Not being able to immediately upload or digitally edit the films you’ve shot may seem an abomination in an era that prizes instantaneity, but, as Abrams shows, it makes possible a drama of conjecture and speculation.
Periods of technological change breed all sorts of fears. Super 8 features characters fiddling with new-fangled Walkman devices and intercepting airforce communications, and manages to link this with broader neuroses: “This feels like a Russian invasion!” cries out a local woman at one point.
At first, the young cast come across as over-gabby and grating, but they soon win us over. Griffiths, as a would-be Orson Welles, has a particularly nice line in slang (“That’s mint!”). Chandler, with his soulful eyes and strangely honourable hairstyle, is that unusual thing: an adult in a child-centred film whose screen time we never begrudge.
As a monster movie, one that splits the difference between E T and King Kong, Super 8, like Cloverfield (which Abrams produced), does well to withhold dramatic revelations almost until the end, keeping us entertained with mysterious details such as disappearing cats and migrating microwaves, and offering a proper story rather than a mere barrage of CGI effects.
There are less effective moments: the sentimental line “Bad things happen, but you can still live”, which is the underlying message of most popular American cinema, anticipates a too comforting if excellently photographed (courtesy Larry Fong) denouement. A sub-plot about Alice’s disreputable father is underwritten.
It has been said that, in terms of themes, narrative arc and even visual motifs, Super 8 is too much like a Spielberg film. Well, better that than being like a Michael Bay film. Abrams has created a clever, enjoyably reverential, and very entertaining update of an old-fashioned boy’s-own caper.
Super 8: Seven Magazine review, by Mike McCahill
Seven rating: * * *
That part of our culture dedicated to regurgitating itself has moved on to the Eighties for sustenance, and JJ Abrams’s Super 8 – concerning a small-town teenage filmshoot interrupted by aliens – means to spark nostalgia from the off. Even its title derives from an obsolete home-movie format.
Early scenes have a fun, Day for Night-via-Bugsy Malone feel, briskly delineating key personnel: chubby, loud-mouthed director Charles (Riley Griffiths); sensitive, just-bereaved make-up artist Joe (Joel Courtney); and lead actress Alice (Elle Fanning), slightly older than the boys, trailing crushes in her wake. Then the aliens arrive, and matters get trickier.
Abrams, kowtowing before his producer Steven Spielberg, has the chaotic kitchens of E.T. and Close Encounters down pat, but this is Spielberg with a media-studies degree, mindful of how the television was always on in the background of those earlier films.
“It’s on the news, so that means it’s real,” Charles huffs of the carnage he’s witnessed in person not hours before. Such dialogue ties Super 8 to the Abrams-produced Cloverfield (2008), a Manhattan monster mash viewed entirely through mobile phone footage. (To the postmodern cineaste, lived experience would appear greatly less important than recorded images.)
What’s been lost is the innocence of those early Spielberg items – the sense of a movie brat taking simple delight in raiding the cinematic toybox. The aliens of Close Encounters were peaceable envoys; inSuper 8, they’re noisy set-crashers, and the whole film indeed gives in to hustle-bustle, constantly reframing itself and trying to top its own effects.
Abrams looks a victim of the aggressively commercialised marketplace that Spielberg and co created: those competing with the cacophony of aTransformers sequel in 3D are obliged to raise their game, or at least crank up the volume.
Super 8 remains a superior demonstration of summer-movie pyrotechnics, but it lacks heart. Joe’s deployment of New Age healing maxims to repel the aliens actually plays as less sincere than the finale ofIndependence Day.
Then again, it seems telling our hero should experience his first stirrings for Alice while making her up as a zombie: any film-making wannabe with a Dawn of the Dead poster on his bedroom wall surely knows a mindless consumer when he sees one.
Cold War sci-fi from the Fifties; George Romero zombie flicks; Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind; the huge shadow archive of scratchy, homemade pictures created by cine-enthusiasts who dreamed of being of Romero and Spielberg: Super 8 is the sweetest film of 2011, an affectionate shout-out to amateurs everywhere.
The year is 1979, the setting small-town Ohio, and the mood one of anxiety. Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is a young teenager who’s struggling to deal with the sudden death of his mother in a factory accident. His father Jack (Kyle Chandler), the local deputy sheriff, can’t understand why the boy spends all his time making backyard movies and wants to send him off to summer camp. Worse still, he’s very much taken with Alice (Elle Fanning), older than him and co-star of the zombie picture he’s making with porky Charles (Riley Griffiths).
One night, while he and his friends are shooting a romantic scene at a railway station, they witness – and accidentally film – an explosive accident that turns out to have been caused by their science teacher (Glynn Turman). Soon the US Air Force, led by cold, arrogant Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich), arrives on the scene hell-bent not so much on finding out what has happened as on organising a massive cover-up that leads them to evacuate half the town. Fired by enthusiasm, curiosity and a sense of adventure, it’s only the teenagers – now half-fugitives and half-detectives – who can get to the bottom of this mystery.
Part of the charm of Super 8, and this will surely be palpable even for filmgoers born in the Eighties and Nineties, is its precise evocation of analogue life in the Seventies. By today’s standards, the equipment that the backyard auteurs use is crude and unwieldy. The footage they capture is extraordinary, plot-defining – yet they have to wait for it to be developed.
We’re meant to infer that making and sharing art is difficult, and that isn’t always a bad thing. Not being able to immediately upload or digitally edit the films you’ve shot may seem an abomination in an era that prizes instantaneity, but, as Abrams shows, it makes possible a drama of conjecture and speculation.
Periods of technological change breed all sorts of fears. Super 8 features characters fiddling with new-fangled Walkman devices and intercepting airforce communications, and manages to link this with broader neuroses: “This feels like a Russian invasion!” cries out a local woman at one point.
At first, the young cast come across as over-gabby and grating, but they soon win us over. Griffiths, as a would-be Orson Welles, has a particularly nice line in slang (“That’s mint!”). Chandler, with his soulful eyes and strangely honourable hairstyle, is that unusual thing: an adult in a child-centred film whose screen time we never begrudge.
As a monster movie, one that splits the difference between E T and King Kong, Super 8, like Cloverfield (which Abrams produced), does well to withhold dramatic revelations almost until the end, keeping us entertained with mysterious details such as disappearing cats and migrating microwaves, and offering a proper story rather than a mere barrage of CGI effects.
There are less effective moments: the sentimental line “Bad things happen, but you can still live”, which is the underlying message of most popular American cinema, anticipates a too comforting if excellently photographed (courtesy Larry Fong) denouement. A sub-plot about Alice’s disreputable father is underwritten.
Super 8: Seven Magazine review, by Mike McCahill
Seven rating: * * *
That part of our culture dedicated to regurgitating itself has moved on to the Eighties for sustenance, and JJ Abrams’s Super 8 – concerning a small-town teenage filmshoot interrupted by aliens – means to spark nostalgia from the off. Even its title derives from an obsolete home-movie format.
Early scenes have a fun, Day for Night-via-Bugsy Malone feel, briskly delineating key personnel: chubby, loud-mouthed director Charles (Riley Griffiths); sensitive, just-bereaved make-up artist Joe (Joel Courtney); and lead actress Alice (Elle Fanning), slightly older than the boys, trailing crushes in her wake. Then the aliens arrive, and matters get trickier.
Abrams, kowtowing before his producer Steven Spielberg, has the chaotic kitchens of E.T. and Close Encounters down pat, but this is Spielberg with a media-studies degree, mindful of how the television was always on in the background of those earlier films.
“It’s on the news, so that means it’s real,” Charles huffs of the carnage he’s witnessed in person not hours before. Such dialogue ties Super 8 to the Abrams-produced Cloverfield (2008), a Manhattan monster mash viewed entirely through mobile phone footage. (To the postmodern cineaste, lived experience would appear greatly less important than recorded images.)
What’s been lost is the innocence of those early Spielberg items – the sense of a movie brat taking simple delight in raiding the cinematic toybox. The aliens of Close Encounters were peaceable envoys; inSuper 8, they’re noisy set-crashers, and the whole film indeed gives in to hustle-bustle, constantly reframing itself and trying to top its own effects.
Abrams looks a victim of the aggressively commercialised marketplace that Spielberg and co created: those competing with the cacophony of aTransformers sequel in 3D are obliged to raise their game, or at least crank up the volume.
Super 8 remains a superior demonstration of summer-movie pyrotechnics, but it lacks heart. Joe’s deployment of New Age healing maxims to repel the aliens actually plays as less sincere than the finale ofIndependence Day.
Then again, it seems telling our hero should experience his first stirrings for Alice while making her up as a zombie: any film-making wannabe with a Dawn of the Dead poster on his bedroom wall surely knows a mindless consumer when he sees one.
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