With Steven Spielberg producing and J.J. Abrams directing (and clearly trying to channel early Spielberg), “Super 8” was pretty summer blockbuster-y; with that partnership—how could it not be?
What I enjoy most about the summer blockbuster formula is the Americana nostalgia. There’s nothing as cotton-candy-tasty as America’s rustic small towns, where you can almost smell the newly mown lawns, hear sprinklers and ice cream trucks, and watch pink-orange sunsets silhouetting water towers then fading to purple-blue dusks illuminated by cozy, amber-colored neighborhood windows. Every American who grew up in suburbia knows whereof I speak.
Other movies (not necessarily blockbusters) that do this type of nostalgia well are “American Graffiti,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Dazed and Confused,” “The Iron Giant,” “A Prairie Home Companion,” and the first ”Transformers.“ And let’s not forget scenes of kids hanging out in local diners, like in ”Back to the Future.”
Spielberg and Abrams Paying Tribute to Their Youth
Like “Stand by Me,” “Super 8” chronicles the time in the lives of boys when they care only about baseball cards, model cars, and whether Batman can beat up Spiderman. In this case, the boys are passionately shooting a home movie about zombies on the Paleolithic 1970s Super 8 video recorder for a local competition in their small Ohio steel town. It’s pretty much a depiction of the life and times of most film directors when they were kids.Abrams makes his hero not the despot-in-waiting director Charles (Riley Griffiths), but the makeup and special-effects artist Joe (Joel Courtney). Joe’s a sweet, shy kid who just lost his mom in a terrible accident at the local steel mill, and he’s misunderstood by his authoritarian deputy sheriff dad (Kyle Chandler).
Joe and his little crew meet for a midnight shoot at a railway station, being chauffeured there by heartthrob “older” girl Alice (Elle Fanning), who’s snuck out and driving her dad’s GTO without a license. Somehow director Charles got her to agree to play “zombie wife.” And when she does, she lays down a precocious, moving performance. Young Joe is smitten.
There tend to be two different types of budding film-director kids: the ones who rig their train sets to blow up and film it, and the ones who follow their friends around filming conversations. It’s clear what Abrams is demonstrating: It’s exactly this kind of moment, where Alice, by dint of heretofore never experienced or imagined acting talent, brings a script to life that the young director wrote and the magic happens. The budding filmmaker spends the rest of his life chasing that magic.
Anyway, the kids are in the middle of filming when a spectacular train-and-pickup-truck crash happens right in front of their eyes (and Super 8 camera), inadvertently capturing something on film that wasn’t supposed to be seen by the general populace.
Electrical goods, car engines, pet dogs, and people start disappearing; the electricity goes haywire county-wide, the cops go sniffing around, and the military shows up and gets cryptic. Something large and very mysterious is afoot.
Don’t Show the MacGuffin
The key to making these things work is that you have to hide the MacGuffin well. “Jaws” would not have been the first massive blockbuster if Bruce, the fake great white shark, had been easily locatable.Blockbusters are also all about the explosions. Generally, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all, but “Super 8” has some outstanding ones.
The film’s two standout performers are Elle Fanning and never-acted-before Joel Courtney in the leads. Theirs is a truly touching puppy love, and Joel has an inherent sweetness that is heartwarming, heartbreaking, and refreshing to see in this time of largely sarcastic “Whatever” children; it harks back to more innocent times.
A slight disappointment are the actors playing the parents of these two, Ron Eldard and “Friday Night Lights” coach Kyle Chandler, respectively. They’re both typically solid actors, though they fall short of earning our emotional investment in these roles.
Likely to appeal to kids young and old, “Super 8” is a good campfire story. If you like remembering those 1970s humid summer nights—when you could see the Dairy Queen sign at night through dark green halos of summer foliage, as well as the cozy islands of gas station lights; when you could hear crickets, katydids, and jacked-up Chevelles and Camaros revving in the distance over by the glow of the drive-in movie; and when you had a crush on the prettiest girl in school so bad it made your bones ache—the nostalgia of “Super 8” is highly recommended.
