Directed by JJ Abrams. Starring Joel Courtney, Kyle Chandler, Elle Fanning, Gabriel Basso, Noah Emmerich, Ron Eldard, Riley Griffiths, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills 12A cert, gen release, 111 min
It's back to the Spielbergs with this enjoyably nostalgic creature feature, writes DONALD CLARKE
AS AUGUST arrives, punters have the right to demand big, noisy uncomplicated entertainments full of action, shocks and outrageous reversals. Super 8is that film. A blend of sci-fi and boy's own adventure, the picture begins with a tragedy, speeds quickly towards a train crash and ends with an entire town battling a slimy behemoth from beyond the stars.
That is all. Go and have fun.
Of course, there's more to it than that. JJ Abrams, creator of Lost, director of the excellent Star Trekreinvention, is a famously clever fellow. An eager student of post- war popular entertainment, he layers all his creations with twisty footnotes that lead the observant viewer in endless intriguing directions.
Super 8is no exception. A tribute to the early work and the early life of Steven Spielberg – and simultaneously a reverie on the director's own youth – the picture is as loaded a cultural artefact as was the most recent Jean-Luc Godard film. Happily, it also remembers to offer the casual cinemagoer a fair share of cheap thrills.
We join the hero, a clever, shy kid named Joe (Joel Courtney), as he faces up to life without his mother, who has recently died in an industrial accident. It is 1979. Spielberg was in his pomp. Abrams was entering his teenage years. Just as significantly, these were the dying days for film as a hobbyist medium. A few short years later, teenage kids would have access to relatively cheap video cameras.
The heroes of Super 8, led by chubby auteur Charles (Riley Griffiths), are making a zombie film. One night, while shooting by the local station, the juvenile crew witnesses a spectacular train crash. Boxes shatter and unusual metallic cubes are scattered about the midwestern farmlands. Later, even creepier things start to happen. All the town's dogs go missing. The army moves in and begins the process of hushing up some obscure conspiracy. Joe's widowed dad (Kyle Chandler), the local deputy, finds himself at the wrong end of official paranoia.
All the classic tropes of Spielbergia are in place. As in the master’s films, the poignant domestic crises are at least as important as the looming intergalactic intrusions. Joe and his father can’t quite connect. The boy is attracted to a local teen (Elle Fanning), the female lead in Charles’s movie, but her father, a drunken depressive, has some sort of beef with the bereaved deputy. Joe’s eventual confrontation with the beast acts as a metaphor for his efforts to overcome familial disharmony.
So far, so ET. But the tone is somewhat different. That Spielberg film, set contemporaneously, melded a yearning for 1950s values – all those tidy suburban homes – with an unease about the conflict that then characterised American domestic life. Despite its moments of sadness, Super 8is an exercise in pure, undiluted nostalgia.
Forget about the Evil Empire, rising inflation, the newly aggressive tone of Reaganism and misunderstandings in Afghanistan. This is the calmer, simpler word that most 40-year-olds believe their teenage selves to have inhabited. The kids use walkie-talkies rather than mobile phones. News comes from the television. The film-makers have to wait three days to see their footage. Imagine.
Shot with Abrams's characteristic (not to say obsessive) taste for horizontal camera flare, Super 8offers such a charming picture of its era that one can ignore the fact that the science-fiction plot doesn't quite come off. As evidenced most conspicuously in Lost, Abrams is brilliant at asking questions, but not quite so gifted at answering them.
Never mind. Such enthusiasm for youth and its culture (from whatever era) deserves to be rewarded with rich box-office takings. That really is all. Go and have fun.
