J.J Abrams seems to be the very opposite of a cult storyteller. He’s widely popular, has attained mass mainstream success, yet there are a section of people who cannot abide his work. Depending on which camp you’re in will probably determine whether you like Super 8 or not.
Personally I’ve always been somewhere in the middle on Abrams, and so went into the screening with a relatively open mind*. Sadly, Super 8 is a movie that starts off strongly, only to become progressively maddening (some would accuse Lost of having a similar problem).
The story is about the fractured relationship between Joe & Jackson Lamb, a father & son, grieving after the death of Joe’s mother and Jackson’s wife, Elizabeth. Jackson’s way of coping is to throw himself obsessively into his work as Deputy Sheriff of the town they live in. Joe’s survival mechanism is to throw himself into helping his best friend, Charles, make a monster movie to enter a competition for young, budding filmmakers during the summer holidays.
Charles and the rest of his (all-male) friends are in the fevered & awkward stages of puberty, which are intensified when Charles ropes in local girl, Alice Dainard to play a pivotal role in his film. Alice is slightly older than the boys, and her arrival sends Joe into a dizzying teenage crush. Alice herself her own frayed bond with her father, Ron. He is a heavy drinker, the kind who uses alcohol as a crutch. Drinking seems to be the only thing that he does well, as his parenting is abysmal. He drinks out of the guilt he feels for Elizabeth’s death, as she died due to an accident at the steel mill where they both worked. Elizabeth was only ever working that day because Ron never turned up for his shift, and she covered his station, with fatal consequences.
The heart of the movie is these people finding differing ways to cope with their individual pain. It’s also thematically similar to the works of Steven Spielberg. However, to call this a rip-off off Spielberg’s movies is unfair and incorrect. It’s derivative in some ways, but Abrams is no hack, and he’d hardly be the first to look to his peers for direct inspiration.
Super 8′s problem is that it’s a film where the story becomes ruined by the plot. One night whilst filming at a train station, Charles’s movie in interrupted by the derailing of a train. The cargo is top secret, and extremely dangerous. The Air Force arrive, evacuating the sleepy Ohioan town’s denizens, and turning it into a battleground – whilst telling the local authorities nothing. At one point they take Jackson prisoner, as he sets out to find what exactly it is the Air Force are trying to capture.
The fact that the Air Force is after an alien should be no surprise. Abrams attempts to inject freshness into this plot development by making the alien a long suffering inhabitant of Earth, who landed decades ago, and was prevented from leaving by scientists who have held it in captivity, whilst subjecting it to torturous experiments. Unsurprisingly, the alien doesn’t think much of the human race and is taking its revenge on anyone it comes across as it tries to escape the planet.
The problem is that the story stops becoming a character study, and becomes a feast of FX. Abrams isn’t Michael Bay, but he can fall into the trap of using FX to wow his audience, rather than service the story. So what had been a good film up to then becomes far too much of, “BANG!, WHOOSH!, LENS FLARE!, WHAT’S THAT NOISE?!, AARRRGH!!!, HIDE BEHIND THIS ROCK!, LENS FLARE!, I HAVE A PLAN!, LENS FLARE!, LENS FLARE!”
And it’s a real pity because the story deserved better than this. The performances were quite good, but in the second-half of the film, the cast stopped acting & simply spent their time reacting to the events around them. This is not a criticism, as the mediocre script didn’t allow them to do much else. But they failed to evoke any empathy from me because they were completely undercooked.
As the movie reaches its conclusion, I was thoroughly underwhelmed. I was relieved that we didn’t end on a perfunctory “Two Weeks Later” scene, where somehow everything is fine, and all problems have been resolved. But my primary feeling was, “I’ve seen this ending before. And I’ve seen it done better.” If you really want a good alien invasion story, without having to go back two decades, may I direct to you Gareth Edwards vastly underrated, Monsters.
* - It’s only fair that I mention that my journey to the cinema took me through parts of London ransacked by looters. It would be fair say this could have had a negative effect on my cinematic experience, making this whole review something of a nebulous exercise.
