The first thing we see is a sign outside a factory: “Safety is Our Primary Goal”. It’s a motto that might also be erected outside the dream factories of risk-averse, big-studio Hollywood – and Super 8, though not exactly radical, does represent a small, cherishable risk in this playing-it-safe summer of sequels and prequels. Let’s put it this way: the audience clamouring to see how Harry Potter ends, or how Erik Whatsisname turned into Magneto, is large and well-established. The audience who were on the cusp of puberty – 12 or 13 or thereabouts – in the very early 80s is significantly smaller, and tends to stay home watching TV these days anyway.
So far, the numbers are significant: Super 8 is a hit in the US, but 71 per cent of its opening-weekend audience was over the age of 25 (this is bad news for Cyprus, where hardly anyone over the age of 25 ever goes to the multiplex). The hype has this down as a nostalgia trip for late-30-somethings, not just a film set in 1979 but a film (so we’re told) that feels like it might’ve been made in 1979; a film, in other words, channelling the early work of its illustrious producer, Steven Spielberg.
That isn’t wholly accurate. Super 8 would like to be the new Close Encounters or E.T. – but in fact it’s closer to the new Stand By Me or The Goonies, a film about a gang of kids having adventures. Unwisely, director J.J. Abrams turns it into a monster movie, which was never the point of those sentimental Spielbergs. There’s a late attempt to hint that our hero Joe (Joel Courtney) has a certain kinship with the monster, like Elliot with E.T. – both make “models”, both must move on after “bad things happen” – but it’s too little, too late.
Indeed, the monster plot is almost an irrelevance. The kids – Joe and his gang, including the scarily precocious Elle Fanning who’s two years younger than most of her male co-stars but seems 10 years older – know there’s something wrong when they witness a train crash while shooting a Super-8 zombie movie (note to those who came in late: Super 8 was what people used for home movies before camcorders took over). The crash is caused by a van being deliberately driven on the train tracks; the driver of the van is one of their teachers, who – banged-up, and possibly dying – warns them: “Do not speak of this, or you and your parents will die!”.
The kids tell no-one what they saw, which is fair enough – but they barely discuss it among themselves, either, which seems inexplicable. In fact, our heroes spend more time trying to make their Super-8 movie than trying to solve the mystery – doubtless because Abrams is more invested in the Super-8 movie (apparently inspired by his own childhood exploits) than he is in the mystery. There’s an irony there, perhaps a comment on the obsessive nature of filmmaking: the monster comes second with the young auteurs, just as it comes second in the film made about them. Is Abrams saying that all filmmakers are basically narcissistic, more interested in themselves – or celluloid versions of themselves – than their ostensible subject? Or (more likely) is it just a coincidence?
The four-star rating is slightly misleading. Super 8 has some problems with plot and pacing. The climax is weak, with a rather lame plan to distract the monster using firecrackers (one of the gang is something of a pyromaniac). What comes before is often lovely, however, sporting the quality that was also present in Abrams’ Star Trek two years ago, the quality most often missing in this age of machine-tooled blockbusters – a wide-eyed romantic excitement, especially in regard to young people teaming up on some great adventure.
The zombie movie is one such adventure, with the podgy director (Riley Griffiths) forever seeking “production value”. Growing up is another adventure, the film’s best scene being the one where Alice (that’s Elle), playing a role in the zombie flick, delivers a wife’s anguished monologue with a grown-up intensity that leaves her co-stars looking awestruck. Most of the film’s sweetest details have to do with Joe’s shy attempts to court her. Crammed in a car with the rest of the gang, he sits in the backseat – oblivious to the other kids’ bickering – holding out a stick of candy till she finally notices him and takes it. Later, when she visits his room, he tidies up frantically, hiding a glimpse of a C- on a school test (a couple of years later, he’d probably be proud of it), and seems unable to find the right words. “Were you sleeping?” “Before. Earlier.”
Does it really feel ‘like a film made in 1979’? Yes and no. Explicit period references are limited to talk of a “Russian attack” and Rubik’s Cube (a slight anachronism), but the kids do seem slightly different to today’s movie tykes – more deferential when speaking to adults, less prone to pop-culture name-dropping (their slang seems limited to “That was mint” and “That was bogus”), and of course without videogames, Facebook, etc. It’s amusing when the town sheriff spots a teen with a Walkman and grumbles about a “slippery slope”. Super 8 doesn’t exactly feel retro, though, just uncluttered – like a film about kids that’s been stripped of the patina of frenzied irony we take for granted today, to reveal the charm underneath.
In a better marketplace, this flawed-but-winning movie would be filed away under ‘minor pleasure’, like the films of Joe Dante (see e.g. Small Soldiers). Right now, however, it feels like a breath of fresh air. “That was a really good zombie murder!” says a junior filmmaker early on, but the podgy director explains that blood and gore aren’t enough for a good movie: you also have to “feel something”. I felt something during Super 8. Then again, I was also on the cusp of puberty in the very early 80s.
DIRECTED BY J.J. Abrams
STARRING Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, Riley Griffiths
US 2011 112 mins.
