SUPER 8

Before the first Transformers movie in 2007 there played a mysterious trailer without a title or much else in the way of explanation. Featured in it was simply a group of hipsters gathered round a New York flat for a going-away party. The atmosphere suggested another independent youngster oriented comedy of the sort catching steam in the late 2000s. Suddenly, though, something unexpected happened that shattered not only the party but the audience’s presumption. A loud explosion was heard from outside the flat followed by a thundering roar. ‘Hmm, that feels out of place in what appeared to be a Judd Apatow style comedy,’ is our first reaction. What’s going on? The group looks out the window and watches buildings come crashing down and the severed head of the Statue of Liberty bouncing down an alley. End of trailer, beginning of the guessing game until January of 2008. What is this movie? A new Godzilla or the long-rumored Voltron movie, perhaps?

            Not long after this cryptic trailer, audiences noticed the name attached to the project and recognized J. J. Abrams as the mastermind behind TV’s Alias, but suspicions of a tie-in involved his then unfolding series Lost. Could this be connected to the then unidentified smoke monster? Well, the guesses would be partially true if only because of the way Abrams works, though not in the way fans thought. The connections to Lost were subtle and ultimately trivial. How so? The Dharma Initiative, a central component to Lost, was name-dropped, thereby establishing a shared universe.

            Cloverfield (as the movie was titled for reasons no one seems to agree on) was ultimately a creative wasteland made successful by a clever marketing strategy and the less than universally appealing gimmick of being shot entirely with a hand-held camera; a lackluster monster movie, if you will, passed off as something special. When it was finally revealed, the monster was nothing to scream about and did little more than chance the young socialites around the city. Cloverfield, however, proved two things besides the fact that marketing campaigns are becoming a more integral part of the filmgoing experience. One is that J.J. Abrams, for all his talent, often struggles with delivering on the expectations he creates, Lost being the most shattering example as a compulsively gripping show ending with one of the most polarizing endings in television history, the other is that clues to his various story-arcs are scattered throughout his body of work.

            Naturally, when the first trailer for Super 8 appeared before Iron Man 2 in May of 2010 links to Cloverfield were suspected, perhaps the rumored sequel. The trailer was less cryptic, but the marketing strategy was familiar. In the trailer we simply see a freight train at night intercut with shots of a pickup truck driving deliberately into the tracks and toward the train. There is a loud and explosive collision, the train being derailed and off the tracks and scatters about the area. But something is still alive inside one of the destroyed compartments and its pushing its way out before the scene goes dark.

Abrams was quick to dispel rumors of a Cloverfield connection, and it’s not hard to imagine why the sequel never got off the ground. Its premise was a dead horse (it was to involve an alternate vantage point of the night of the monster attack from another photographer) and involved the hand-held camera gimmick of which the success the first time around is disputable at best (a good comparison being Robert Montgomery’s point-of-view camera in Lady in the Lake).

            Super 8 did share some attributes with Cloverfield, not the least of which was the viral marketing but, also, the theme of video recording when something spectacular shatters the ordinary (more of a McGuffin in Super 8 than it was in Cloverfield), and a military plan to destroy the area of invasion (Operation Walking Distance here and the far more drastic Operation Hammerdown in Cloverfield). Further, Slusho, the drink responsible for the awakening of the Cloverfield monster when its production company began drilling in the ocean depths for ingredients, appears as a product here in a convenience store.

            Be that as it may, even without Abrams’s comment, when released, Super 8 would have cleared away all suspicion that it had anything to do with 2008’s dud. While Cloverfield was an airy bag of tricks, Super 8 is nearly a great film. Super 8 has a soul while its ancestor was, in the words of one critic, “emotionally sadistic”.

            There are two stories in Super 8 and the one that matters is not the one advertised. It’s all about the story of the kids with a love for movie magic. This one is the real testament to Steven Spielberg’s financial and creative backing of the film. There is enough there to make a wonderful movie, standing alone firmly in its own simplicity.

            In a quiet little town in Ohio (Spielberg’s home state) a gang of middle-school aged friends set out to make a zombie movie in the summer of 1979. Super 8 cameras are a hot new toy for aspiring filmmakers and thanks to George Romero zombies are the monsters of choice. The movie serves as escapism from the pains of adolescence; the death of a parent, the insecurities of the surviving parent, and watching your crush fall for your best friend. There is even the loss of a pet, a heart trigger Spielberg has always had his finger on, using it as a tactic to get his child actors in E.T. to cry for key scenes and then and then used it as dark humor in Lost World: Jurassic Park. Whether a statement or not, the death of the dog at the jaws of the T-Rex in Lost World is indicative of either a society grown cynical since E.T. or Spielberg’s own cynicism since, given that the boy in that scene is more awed by a dinosaur in his backyard than saddened by the loss of his pet. Here the town dogs merely run away when danger arrives in town, but the movie is smart enough to comment on the emotionally impact of such a loss. But Super 8 is also familiar with the many joys we tend to forget when we get older. Movies, especially fantastical ones, captivate us in a way they never can again once we are past a certain age. For Joe (Joel Courtney) and his friends, making a movie is not only a hobby but the thrill of creating a supernatural world. Abrams and childhood friend Larry Fong drew heavily from their own recollections.

            “I had a friend who lived across the street from J.J., and we’d make Super 8 movies while J.J. was across the street working on his own Super 8 stuff,” Fong said. “Eventually, J.J. and I started making movies together. I wasn’t the cameraman, though. I remember helping him out with special-effects makeup!”

            “The DNA of Super 8 is this weird, geeky obsession we had with the magic of making movies when we were kids,” Abrams added. “Larry had to shoot this movie because our references were exactly the same. We lived them together.”

Naturally, the kids in Super 8 link the pride of making a movie to the other joy that comes only once in a lifetime, your first crush. Being the director gives Charles (Riley Griffiths) courage to ask Alice (Elle Fanning), the dream girl of every boy in the town, to star in his movie. But, the shared sorrow of being raised by an inattentive single father creates instead a bond between Alice and Joe and the most inspired moments in Super 8 are the tender, endearingly awkward, moments between the two young lovers. The word is never mentioned, but it’s perfectly clear to anyone who remembers their first love.

            Super 8 understands its young leads, handling their wide-ranging emotions remarkably well. It begins establishing the work-related death of Joe’s mother as a backdrop, but thanks to Courtney’s emotive performance, the sadness lingers in Joe’s face even after the movie flash-forwards four months later. Alice’s mother may as well be dead for all Alice knows. She left Alice some time ago with a father (Ron Eldard) who tries to drink his sorrows away. Through their similar losses, Alice and Joe find each other while their newly single fathers learn to act on their love for their children. Things are further complicated in that Joe’s father (Kyle Chandler who is quietly becoming one of our best actors), the deputy sheriff, blames Alice’s dad for his wife’s death (she took his shift at the steel factory on the day of the incident that took her life).

            All the kids get a chance to shine, though. Charles is the most dynamic of the gang and is likely Spielberg’s avatar; the boy from Ohio with a love of film. Perhaps because of Spielberg’s connection to the character, Charles’s love for Alice is treated compassionately, though it is obviously hopeless even to Charles. The rest of the gang are as charming as the Goonies, each with their own quirk and moment to glory.

            As in E.T. the measure of the adults is determined by how they are changed by children. As hostile as they are to each other, Joe and Alice’s fathers have much in common starting with the loss of the women in their lives and the challenge of showing love for their child. It will take an external force to bring them together, in this case, the US Air Force that begins scouring the town in search of their runaway cargo from Area 51. In E.T. the reasonable authority figure played by Peter Coyote saved the face of the US government. Super 8 offers the government no such positive face with the exception of Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), the ex-government researcher discharged when he discovered a way to communicate with the alien survivor when it first crashed its ship on Earth in 1958 and Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich) who is redeemed with a final act of valor before being devoured by the alien.

            Indeed, Super 8 looks and feels like the kind of movie Spielberg used to make so well. It remembers the lost magic, wonder, and mystery of being young and with a big imagination, thanks to the input of a filmmaker who never let go of those sentiments. Thus, there is a sharp divide in Super 8 where Spielberg’s movie ends and Abrams’s begins. Almost everything involving the alien, its stranding on Earth and its attempt to rebuild its ship to return home feels like the new generation at work and, unfortunately, lacks the subtle thrill of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which the finale of this film is reminiscent of. Fong noted the similarities, “The look of that movie informed all my choices, from lighting schemes to color and lenses, as well as the format we shot in, 35mm anamorphic.”

  Some of it is well done, no doubt. Abrams is a talented mind and the train wreck, for instance, has the polish of a cinematic wizard. The truck that will bring forth such destruction appears first as a negligible vehicle in the distance, our attention diverted to the kids filming at the train depot. Joe is the first to notice that something doesn’t look right. The truck makes a suicidal turn into the tracks, racing toward the train. As it becomes increasing clear that something bad is about to happen, our priority shifts from Charles’s movie to the inevitable collision, even before we learn who is driving the truck, why they are determined to stop the train, and what the train is carrying.

Abrams designed this scene ingenuously, placing red lights of decreasing size on poles of decreasing size along the tracks making them appear far longer than the model they built at Agua Dulce’s Firestone Ranch really was, this way allowing longer for the suspense to develop and gather more momentum before the impact. He then sprinkled the surrounding hills with bulbs, creating the illusion of a town.

In smaller doses, this expertly crafted suspense returns in two of the film’s most effective moments, the attack at the convenience store and the assault on the bus used by the Air Force to transport the meddlesome kids. The latter is modeled much like the T-Rex attack on the trailer in Lost World, here with the added advantage of real human drama.

            The parts focusing on the alien are at their best when they balance fear with drama, even in something as simple as the community’s devotion to their runaway dogs, expressed through a poignant shot  where the camera pans out to an entire billboard covered with lost dog fliers, each representing a broken heart somewhere. At best, the movie’s use of the alien is in the Hollywood tradition of sending hurting humans help from an unknown (and sometimes feared) presence from another world. This has worked well countless times before and would have again here had Super 8 dug deeper from Spielberg’s past work. But the alien here is simply a gimmick and one that belongs in a different movie. As he undoubtedly knew, Abrams had the makings of a complete movie in the story of the kids and their cameras. The finale in the alien’s underground liar feels like a conclusion spliced from another movie of a different nature made to work as the ending to Super 8. Little thought was put in developing the alien or connecting him to Joe and the gang, probably because it mattered little. The alien was little more than a selling point, emotionally distanced from the soul of Super 8.

            The irony is, of course, that Super 8 is a very good movie despite the use of the creature. It will be remembered but not for anything to do with the alien. When we look back on Super 8 it will be for its heart, its style, and the impressive performances by Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney. Also, it will be remembered fondly for being the movie that proved Steven Spielberg remembers the endless possibilities before you when you are a young man with a camera and an imagination and that he also knows what it’s like for adults in danger of forgetting that.