A film
review by Roger Ebert, June 8, 2011.
With its
night skies filled with mystery, its kids racing around town on bicycles and
its flashlights forming visible beams in the air, Super 8 has the visual signatures of an early Spielberg movie. Its
earnest young heroes stumble upon an awesome mystery and try to investigate it
themselves. And as an Ohio town experiences frightening events, we feel poised
between The Goonies and a 1950s
sci-fi film with the characters lined up side by side and looking in alarm at
an awesome sight.
The
associations are deliberate. Steven
Spielberg produced the film, and its director, J.J. Abrams, worked in lowly roles on early Spielberg movies before
going on to make Mission Impossible III
(2006) and Star Trek (2009) — and produce
Lost on TV. What they're trying to do
is evoke the innocence of an E.T.
while introducing a more recent level of special effects. There are really two
movies here, one about the world of the kids and one about the expectations of
the audience, and Super 8 leads a
charmed life until the second story takes command.
Set in
the 1970s, it opens with its 12-year-old hero, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), helping his intense friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) make an 8mm zombie
movie for a local film festival. This of course must be done in secret, not so
much because parents would forbid it, but because it's fun to operate with
stealth. Besotted by stories of other young directors (no doubt including
Spielberg), they scout locations, improvise costumes and energetically apply
zombie makeup. In this
they are greatly assisted by 14-year-old Alice (Elle Fanning), who not only plays the zombie mother but just as
important, sneaks out with her father's car to drive them all to a midnight
shoot at the local train station.
A great
opportunity develops when a train comes rumbling out of the night. Action! Charles shouts, and Joe and
Alice try to perform their dialogue as the train rumbles past. Then a pickup
truck appears, racing on the tracks toward the train. The train wreck goes on
and on and on, tossing railroad cars around like dominoes. You would think a
freight car loaded with heavy metals couldn't fly very high into the sky, but
you'd be wrong. This is a sensationally good action sequence, up there with the
airplane crash in Knowing.
Yes,
something ominous is happening, but I'd better not say what. Part of the
delicious fun of the film is the way it toys with portents. For example, Joe's
dog disappears. He tacks up a card on a notice board. We see that countless
dogs have disappeared. Later, there's a map of where missing dogs have been
found. The dots form a ring around the city. All the dogs ran out of town. This
moment reminded me of the great shot in The
Thing (1952), when the scientists stood on the outline of something in the
Antarctic ice and when Howard Hawks' camera drew back; we saw they were in a
circle.
Meanwhile,
human elements come into play. Joe's mother was killed not long ago in an
accident at the steel mill. He mourns her. His father, Deputy Sheriff Jack Lamb
(Kyle Chandler). has grown distant
and depressive. Joe begins to bond with Alice, who is two years older but
sympathetic and nice. There's an oddly touching scene where he helps her with
her zombie makeup.
It is a
requirement of these films that adults be largely absent. The kids get involved
up to their necks, but the grown-ups seem slow to realize strange things are
happening. Here, the mystery centers on the cargo of the cars in the train
wreck, and on the sudden materialization of U.S. Air Force investigators and
troops in town. If we don't instinctively know it from this movie, we know it
from a dozen earlier ones: The authorities are trying to cover up something
frightening, and the kids are on the case.
During
the first hour of Super 8, I was
elated by how good it was. It was like seeing a lost early Spielberg classic.
Then something started to slip. The key relationship of Alice and her troubled
father Louis (Ron Eldard) went
through an arbitrary U-turn. Joe's own father seemed to sway with the
requirements of the plot. The presentation of the threat was done with obscure
and unconvincing special effects. We want the human stories and the danger to
mesh perfectly, and they seem to slip past one another.
All the
same, Super 8 is a wonderful film,
nostalgia not for a time but for a style of filmmaking, when shell-shocked
young audiences were told a story and not pounded over the head with aggressive
action. Abrams treats early adolescence with tenderness and affection. He uses
his camera to accumulate emotion. He has the rural town locations right.
And he
does an especially good job with Joe, Alice, Charles and their friends,
especially Cary (Ryan Lee). You know
how a lot of heist and action movies have an explosives expert? Cary is the kid
who is always playing with matches and fireworks. There was always some kid
like that in school. The grown-ups said if he kept on like that he'd blow off a
finger. We were rather grateful for the suspense.
The supporting cast includes Noah Emmerich and Gabriel Basso.
Labels:
mystery, sci-fi, thriller
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