Occasional Movie Review: Super 8

In a small town in 1979, a group of kids shooting an amateur film accidentally document a suspicious train crash that nearly gets them killed. As they recover from the experience and naively try to put their movie back together, they find the event has not only affected their film project, but their own friendships and, to a larger extent, the entire town as well. Caught up in the mysterious occurrences and the responding military presence, tensions rise and the children find themselves at the heart of the conflict. 

I have to preface my opinion of Super 8 by talking first about Cloverfield - JJ Abrams’s 2008 monster movie seems to have polarized audiences pretty neatly to opposite ends with its guerrilla shaky-cam style, but probably more so because it took a risk to deny the viewer any revelatory, conclusive answers. Since the story is told through eyes (or camera) of a handful of inconsequential bystanders, the characters never really figure out exactly what is going on, despite managing to trek all over New York and face the gangly monster over and over again before the movie’s end. Audiences either saw it as a novel idea and a fresh take on the Godzilla mythos, or a nauseating tease that failed to resolve in any satisfactory manner. I find myself in the former group. I think it took a conventional story and spun it with a simple change of perspective. I don’t need, or rather want to know where the monster came from and in that way I got a lot of enjoyment out of the movie. I need to point this out because essentially Super 8 draws a lot from Cloverfield. Its treatment of the mysterious ‘Thing’ at the root of the story is very similar, so if you were put off by Abrams’s previous mystery/disaster flick you may want to skip this one.

That being said, there are some deliberate factors that show Abrams set out to differentiate Super 8 from its present-day-New-York counterpart. Most important of these is the emphasis on the human element of the story: the characters in Cloverfield truthfully only existed to narrate and point the camera, the giant monster taking the spotlight and doing all the work. This time, however, there is a definite attempt to focus the attention on the people, and more specifically how this event affects the relationships between the central characters. The kids of the movie are in that floaty limbo of pre-pubescence and they end up growing up pretty quickly with the fallout of this strange disaster. Meanwhile, old tensions between families flare and collide. All this is great, but you may have noticed my use of the word ‘attempt’. This is the main issue with Super 8; the movie seems to get lost in itself, taking great care to draw interest in this supernatural mystery before flipping the focus onto the kids, and eventually back to the monster again. As the viewer, it’s hard to tell who to root for.

The movie sets out pretty decidedly following Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his strained friendship with Charles (Riley Griffiths) over their romantic feelings toward their new actress and friend, Alice (Elle Fanning). However the social conflict between these characters and their families takes a backseat midway through the movie in order to make way for the creature that begins terrorizing their town. Insert the military and a weak side-story involving Joe’s father (Kyle Chandler) and our teenage triumvirate is largely tossed to the wayside until the movie feels it’s time for the emotional resolution. It’s an unfortunate disconnect that removes the audience from the story and eventually leads to the sudden and subsequently lackluster ending. 

I feel like Super 8 is caught in a dead zone between Cloverfield and its supposed influence, E.T., and worry that it doesn’t fit comfortably enough with either to garner comparable success. It feels like a monster movie crashed Stand by Me (which admittedly sounds awesome). There are a few other notes I desperately think are discussion-worthy but can’t bring up for spoilery reasons so I’ll leave it here. Generally Super 8 has either got you hooked with its viral advertising campaign or you’re probably not interested. Whichever of those two categories you fall into I think should decide whether or not you see it. Though I will say that for what it’s worth, Super 8 has one of the most entertaining end credits footage I can remember.