A modest hit in America with no stars and limited franchise brand awareness (the presence of Steven Spielberg as producer does not necessarily count as a guarantee of quality – just ask viewers of the Transformers trilogy), Super 8 is very much in the mid-range blockbuster. Set in 1979, it features a spectacular train wreck and a giant CGI alien that seems to have wandered out of the movie Cloverfield. In many ways, this is a horror film for kids. It even features a bunch of middle-schoolers making their own zombie film, interrupted as it is by the aforementioned train wreck and the invasion of the military into their small town.
Writer-director JJ Abrams, who also produced Cloverfield as well as the hit if finally disappointing televison series Lost, has taken a leaf out of Spielberg’s ET. His young protagonist, Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler), is brought up by a single parent, deputy sheriff Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney). Mother has died in an industrial accident, the first at the Lillian Steel Mill for 647 days. She was covering for another employee, Louis Danard (Ron Eldard), who was sleeping off a bender. When Louis turns up at the wake, Joe has him ejected. Meanwhile, Jackson’s best friend, Charles (Riley Griffiths), wants to know if his buddy will still do the make-up on his monster flick. Other kids want to sneak a peek in the coffin.
A few months later and filming takes place. Charles invites Louis’ daughter, Alice Danard (Elle Fanning) to take the only female part – she can also drive, which is a bonus. However, Charles gets more of the “production values” than he asks for when the train that is meant to be speeding past is met in the other direction by a land rover driven by Jackson’s science teacher Dr Woodward (Glynn Turman). The train contains something secret – Abrams loves conspiracies – including little boxes that appear to have lives of their own. In the ensuing carnage, something escapes.
For most of the movie’s length, we don’t see the creature, but around the 70-minute mark the action ramps up. Most of the film is build-up. Dogs disappear. The sheriff is detained by the military attempting to recover their loss and electro-magnetic stuff happens.
Super 8 has awkward pacing – you expect it to move faster – and in some ways resembles this year’s Simon Pegg and Nick Frost sci-fi misfire Paul. The tension between Joe and Louis resembles that between Jack and Sawyer in Lost. On balance, it is entertaining. The alien is suitably impressive. There is some attempt to re-define the genre – there is no alien landing set piece – and we have not so much “ET phone home” as “ET find the right intelligence to help it build its own space craft”.
The real pleasure in the film is contained over the end credits when we finally see Charles’ super-8 amateur movie The Case. You’ll laugh, be charmed and won’t look at the technical credits. There’s a nice homage to Orson Welles, too. Like Lost, Super 8 does not really deliver on its pre-release build-up – I was expecting something a tiny bit more special – and the “shocks” were theme park ride jolts
