Plot
In the summer of 1979, Jo Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his friends witness an almighty train crash while making a super 8 movie for a contest. When people start to go missing amid increasingly strange occurrences throughout the town, they soon suspect that there was much more to that train than originally met the eye.
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| Just out of shot: a dribbling Hell beast. |
Every summer, Hollywood does its big-money best to convince us peons that the world is ending, doomed to a vicious death under the wrathful attack of aliens, or robots, or fire, or nature, or anything they bloody well feel like blowing up in our collective slack-jawed faces because WE LIKE TO WATCH THIS. So much so that even the most innocent narrative varieties have now been doused in CGI wartastic explodeyness. Fancy an old-school coming-of-age teenage nostalgia trip? Well un-bloody-lucky, because what’s a film these days without a great big bitey beastie from planet angry in the misunderstood galaxy. Incongruous you say? Nonsense! Now sit back, stop thinking, and look at how bright and shiny everything is.
Excuse the ramblomatic opening there because, all in all, Super 8 is a good film. It is also a bitterly frustrating film, demonstrating a deft understanding of one of cinema’s long-forgotten tropes in one hand – that of the coming-of-age title epitomised by Spielberg’s 1980s dominion – while then shooting itself in the foot with the ‘Modern Cinema’ gun with the other. That this was originally conceived as two separate films is as surprising as night following day.
So lets talk about Spielberg. Super 8 is, a clearly heartfelt, homage to all that Spielberg did for cinema during the 70s and 80s, his influence practically oozing out of its every pore. Thinking back and the likes of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind ring strong indeed, with families and friends dealing with very real issues on the backdrop of something decidedly a bit ‘bigger’, namely aliens. In many ways Super 8 is a quintessential summer family film; a coming-of-age tale punctuated by teenage kicks, family drama, eyegasm set-pieces and the odd metal-hoarding, train-wrecking, Rubik cube champion creature from another world. Despite the bountiful amount of money that has clearly been thrown at it however, the real charm and appeal of the film lies in its titanium strong ties to other classic yarns such as Stand By Me and its primary focus on a group of rag-tag kids, much like the Spielberg films of yore.
The kids, it has to be said, are outstanding, their infectious rapport providing the heart and soul - the proverbial sun in the solar system - of the film around which everything else revolves. Together they form a delightfully eclectic bunch – arranged like an orchestra: cute-and-heroey, tall-and-scaredy, fat-and-bossy, smart-and-geeky, small-and-pyromaniac…y - hearkening back to a more light-hearted era where the Goonies could run around like caffeine fuelled chimps without a care in the world. Special mention must be paid to Elle Fanning’s Alice – the love interest drafted in to help the boys and their film production – who’s performance is as transfixing for the boys and their film-within-a-film as it is for us as the audience watching the whole picture.
It says a lot really that, as the film turns its emphasis away from the kids to the naughty rampaging sort-of baddy, it takes a very definite decline. That’s not to say that the alien, action and explosions are poor, far from it. In any other run-of-the-mill sci-fi summer fest they’d be perfectly…fine. And its there that the problem lays. Its all just too ordinary, generic even: creature crash-lands, gets captured, experimented on, escapes and then wants to go home. Its been done a thousand times before and it’ll all be done again, which is fine – an awful word that – but in comparison to the sheer charm and entertainment found in the first half coming-of-age tale its just so massively disappointing that it mars the whole experience.
The pacing is well managed up until the final third. The disparate narrative strands, which could have easily fallen apart under less able hands, weave together nicely, combining Jo’s grief over the loss of his mother – and its ramifications for both his and Alice’s family - with the framing device of the film production all the while steadily establishing the town-wide extraterrestrial mystery. Then the tanks role in and scowly men scowl while they blow up houses for no good reason and the whole thing begins to stink of ‘blockbuster’. It’s nothing short of irritating. The relationship between Jo and Alice, wonderfully composed on the backdrop of mutual grief and hardship epitomised by the difficulties of their respective fathers, suddenly ceases to exist, as though the alien suddenly pops up with nothing more than a casual ‘Hi guys, its my turn now’.
In case you can’t tell, the alien is disappointing. It doesn’t even have the good grace to pull a Cloverfield: despite being the veritable Mr. MacGuffin for 90% of the film you end up seeing so much of the thing you could draw its freakish crab face in your sleep. His unveiling ends the tantalising drip-feed of fleeting flashes in petroleum puddles, or rear-view mirrors – which works well, complimenting the film as a whole - and sounds the drum for the descension into typical sci-fi explodeyness. Not to mention calling the drastic cull of the emphasis on the children, instead throwing the whole production into a jarringly sudden warzone. It is also very difficult to feel anything for the alien outside of derision – E.T. this ain’t. Yeah we know you’re away from home, sad and misunderstood, but the whole ‘poor beasty trapped and scared’ dynamic is made almost impossible to follow when the thing spends the entire film munching the faces of innocent human folk.
But hey, at least the film knows how you go about blowing up a train. What is quite possibly the most exaggerated, comically over-the-top explosive set-piece of the summer makes those unruly Transformers lot look like a sports match between Team Snail and Team Sloth; as much action as a morgue.
Verdict
Super 8 is, for all intents and purposes, two different films – one a charming, engrossing coming-of-age adventure, the other yet another piece of manufactured summer Hollywoodness; not exactly bad, just ordinary, the very definition of that wonderfully bland term: ‘fine’. It’s a good package overall, but the frustrating turn of pace makes you wish the alien had, at the very least, the good grace to stay hidden in the bushes.
3/5
Watch the trailer to find out everything the film isn't about:
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