Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
6/19/11
There
are a whole lot of perks to being one of those lucky few filmmakers who
gets the word “genius” tossed around beside their name, but probably the
coolest is the ability to make one of those movies that's an homage to
the stuff floating around inside your head. Make those kind of movies
in a way that doesn't play outside your head, and you end up like M. Night
Shayamalan. But do what JJ Abrams, the creator of TV phenomenon Lost
and director of the blockbuster Star Trek reboot,
has done with Super 8, and it only makes that genius talk get louder.
It's one of those style remakes filmmakers love, an attempt to mount a
new Amblin Entertainment kids sci-fi adventure two decades after they went
out of style, shot as though it was in fact still the Golden Age of Steven
Spielberg. The Jaws director is on hand as producer, just
as he would have been back in the day, and 1979 (actually a couple years
early for movies like this to have been popular) is reproduced with loving
attention to detail. But what makes Super 8 wonderful is that
it isn't just a solid replication of an Amblin production (for those too
young to recognize the name, Back to the Future and The Goonies
were among their most popular titles), it stands as one of the best.
Laced with the kind of 50's monster movie touches that used to make their
way into mainstream 80's movies and acted at a pretty high level by a mostly
unfamiliar cast of kids, Super 8 nails old school Spielberg's sense
of slow-mounting suspense in a way alien to modern genre blockbusters.
If you grew up with this stuff, it's a real treat. And I certainly
hope kids of every generation never stop eating this sort of thing up.
It's
1979 in Lillian, OH. 13-year-old Joe Lamb (Joe Courtney) is reeling
from the death of his mother in a factory accident. His father, Sheriff's
Deputy Jackson (Kyle Chandler), blames Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard) for the
accident: the town drunk, he called in sick and she was filling in
for him the day it happened. Things are tough between father and
son, and Joe seeks solace in a Super 8 film project his friend Charles
(Riley Griffiths) is making for a contest. It's a zombie movie, and
Charles thinks it needs both more pathos and more production values.
For the former, he's enlisted Louis' daughter Alice (Elle Fanning) to join
the cast and for the later, he takes the lot of them to the local train
station to film as a locomotive rushes by. There's an instant spark
between Alice and Joe, and she proves to be a surprisingly skilled actress.
But the train thing doesn't go quite as well: just as it's racing
past their cameras, a pickup truck steers onto the tracks and starts a
spectacular crash that scatters the train and its mysterious cargo of white
cubes all over the countryside. The kids find one of their teachers
(Glynn Turman) in bad shape behind the wheel: he pulls a gun on them
and tells them to run and tell no one or “they” will kill both them and
their families. Just as they're getting away, a military force led
by Nelec (Noah Emmerich) swoops down. Jackson is suspicious, especially
when Nelec refuses to show them the train manifest. But Charles is
excited to use the invading force as even more production value, getting
his actors in front of first their picking through the train crash and
then a systematic search of the town. The kids are oblivious to the
mounting concerns of Lillian's adults: electronic appliances of all
kinds are vanishing, dogs are running off en masse, and people are starting
to disappear. Jackson forbids Joe to see Alice anymore, but all interpersonal
problems will have to be set aside when she too disappears, Nelec's men
abduct Jackson, and the military starts an evacuation so they can initiate
“Operation Walking Distance”. When Joe and Martin watch the developed
footage from the crash, they learn what this is really all about, and it's
going to take all the courage they can muster to save Alice and the town
from the crossfire between Nelec's troops and what was on that train.
His
previous theatrical blockbusters Mission: Impossible 3 and
Star Trek had given viewers a good sense of
Abrams' skill as a filmmaker, but among his past work it's the iconic Lost
TV pilot that most comes to mind when watching Super 8. The
way the scary events involving the train and its escaped cargo slowly build
from background noise to the entire story while the characters real lives
play out in the foreground is unusually well done, as is the way he works
the power of the arts to help people like Joe and Alice process their personal
tragedies. And when he finally delivers the genre goods, they're
thematically rich and impressive, working very 21st Century ideas about
the peril with which we treat our enemies as though they weren't human,
and the power of empathy without sacrificing the fact that the threat is
real and lives are at stake. And, man, that train crash sure is something,
as is 3rd act action at which I would be remiss to hint.
Perhaps
the most interesting thing about the stylistic homage in play here is the
way Abrams actually directs like it was 30 years ago. Super 8
seems to contain no more than 20% as many cuts as a summer blockbuster
made today, and it's really interesting to think about the way pointing
the camera at a spot on the wall and waiting for the actors to walk into
position makes his tempo more suspenseful than if he'd followed them everywhere
with relentless cuts or handheld tracking shots. Michael Giacchino's
score also does a great job of capturing the period. In fact, pretty
much the only thing that's not retro are the special effects, and after
Abrams has skillfully kept his creature off-screen for over half the running
time, it cuts loose with impressive state-of-the-art flair even as the
visual ideas behind it remain firmly rooted in the Joe Dante/Robert Zemeckis
era.
The
kids are richer and more real than you'd usually see in this kind of movie,
with believably childlike concerns. Bossy Charles' bravado conceals
myriad insecurities, leading man Martin (Gabriel Basso) can't learn his
lines and is a projectile vomiter in the face of danger and cameraman Cary
(Ryan Lee), who seems to play ever single zombie in the kids' movie, is
a crazy firebug whose love of blowing stuff up comes in handy when it's
time to go monster fighting. All three actors do a great job of being
relateable without going over the edge into cutesy. Courtney, making
his film debut, utterly nails a template of Spielbergian angsty innocent
gumption that was perfected before he was born. And Fanning, the
veteran of this crew as the youngest member of the rare showbiz family
assembly line that specializes in producing talented actors, personifies
every geeky teen's dream girl while delivering a real, nuanced performance
that's one of the best jobs I've ever seen of showing how one turns their
personal pain into art (even if it's Super 8 zombie movie art). The
movie they're making is seriously charming in the way it combines adult
subjects with a kid's lack of understanding of just how they work.
The
grown-ups are first-rate as well. Chandler, at an interesting moment
in his career after completing an acclaimed 5-year run on TV's Friday
Night Lights, is perfect as the emotionally inaccessible man who's
never had to be a Dad to his son or a Sheriff to his town and finds both
responsibilities dropped in his lap simultaneously. Eldard does a
great job summoning that special cocktail of drunkenness, rage and self-pity
that fuels a certain kind of small-town guy without seeming so horrid we
can't rally behind him when need be. Emmerich, so good at being simultaneously
likable and sneaky, here is at his most casually sinister. And Turman
has a couple of really solid scenes laying out the connection between the
past and present.
Super
8 bubbles over with nostalgia, suspense and pathos, a wonderful example
of a filmmaker who knows exactly how to execute what he's grasping for.
A Star Trek sequel and the regular fall round of new TV shows he's
helped create should all be fun, but it really leaves you eager to see
what other kinds of original movie stories are rattling around inside JJ
Abrams' head. |
