Super 8 is Lost co-creator JJ Abrams’s third feature film as a director, a film about friendship friendship and the trials of growing-up. With added aliens.
Before we begin, be warned that there will be no banging on about Spielberg and his influence on Super 8 and JJ Abrams. It’s been done by everyone else already. We know that Super 8 is hugely influenced by ET, Close Encounters, Jaws, The Terminal, Schindler’s List (OK, maybe not the last two). This is a Spielberg-free review and there will be no mention of his name starting...now!
The concept for the film is nothing particularly new. In Lillian, Ohio in 1979, a group of classic high-school misfits including Joe (Joel Courteney) and Alice (Elle Fanning) are making a zombie film on a handheld camera (the Super 8 of the title), when a train crash releases an alien into the town. This ain’t no cuddly extra-terrestrial though – like ET, this alien wants to go home but it doesn’t mind cracking some skulls to get there.
The kids are very much the stars of this film, never taking a back-seat to the alien in the way the adults of the Abram’s produced Cloverfield did. Every time we leave to follow the alien we yearn to be back with their wisecracks and the budding relationship between Alice and Joe. Courteney and Fanning stand out here, with a performance of great maturity from Fanning in particular. While this shouldn’t be surprising given her turn in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and her sister Dakota’s achievements, it is difficult to believe she is only 13. In the rehearsal for the scene shot at the train station, she easily outshines her stuttering co-star, mesmerising the boys and the audience.
Abrams’s direction throughout the film is hit-and-miss. He intersperses emotion with humour and smatters the film with delicate touches like the water-tower visible through the hole the cube creates in Joe’s bedroom wall. The stand-out sequence features the Air Force train carrying the alien crashing while the kids are filming a scene at the town’s railway station in the dead of night. It’s one hell of a crash, and scenes like this are the reason you go to the cinema. It would lose its power on a television screen, and conversely I suspect it would be even better viewed on an IMAX screen.
However, the back-story involving Alice and Joe’s relationships with their fathers feels forced and underdeveloped, though it undoubtedly aids the effect of their budding relationship on us as they find solace in each other. I would also have ordered a redesign on the white Rubik’s Cubes that comprise the alien’s spacecraft – it’s difficult to take a film whose alien flies a spaceship basically made out of Lego seriously. We feel nothing for the alien when it is eventually introduced during a final third that feels rushed and pandering to the studio’s demands of explosions and action in what is classified as a summer blockbuster. The ending packs an emotional punch but little else, and you can’t help feeling that other directors (still mentioning no names) would have done a more accomplished job with what is undoubtedly a fantastic screenplay.
It was so nearly a perfect film, but a weak final third and an overreliance on the work of past masters lets Super 8 down.
4/5
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