Yeah, based on this poster, I thought the flick was about haunted oil rigs
dir: J. J. Abrams
Homage to the 70s, homage to old cameras, homage to Steven Spielberg? Do any of these things really need to be honoured and celebrated? The 70s isn’t exactly the forgotten decade, the Super 8 camera is missed by no-one with a half decent mobile, and Steven Spielberg has made more money at the box office than Jesus and is plenty celebrated by Hollywood and all its legions of sycophants.
So what worthy thing is J.J. Abrams really bringing to the table? He’s made a summer blockbuster aping elements of Spielberg’s early blockbusters, except he has access to a whole bunch of CGI and a cast of people pretending to be characters from ET and That 70s Show. And in which gentle world worth living in is any of that necessary or ever desirable?
None. When younger directors honour the most well rewarded and celebrated directors of all time, it’s kind of like having a fund raising pass-the-hat around in honour of Bill Gates or Warren Buffett: like they’ve not had enough payola and praise already over the decades?
And surely if someone wants to see something like the Close Goonie Encounters of the ET Jaws kind, they could just watch Close Encounters, ET, Jaws etc in their own sweet time. It’s not like they’re rare films unavailable for decades in any format or media. Who needs J.J Abrams, the ‘creative genius’ behind Lost and Alias, to remix the greatest hits of the 1970s for our amusement and patronage? No-one.
And yet… and yet…
Yeah, it already sounds like I’m being snarky, or that I didn’t like it, so let me just admit upfront that I enjoyed the flick a lot. Oodles and heaps. Abrams may be a ham and an arch manipulator extraordinaire, but he apparently learned from the best hams and arch manipulators, a lá Spielbergo. Right upfront he delivers his mission statement: to thank and honour three of the biggest directors of that generation that came of cinematic age in the 1970s (Spielbergo, Coppola and Lucas) who inspired him to pick up a camera, and to deliver a flick the way he thinks Spielbergo might have back in the day. Sure, it’s a monster flick, but the monster barely figures into it, because most of our time and focus is on the protagonist kids. Won’t someone please ignore the children for once? No, children are the future, so… it’s all about the kids.
The way it should be, even if that sounds creepy.
The flick’s first image wouldn’t seem to gel with what the flick was promoted with: yes, the ad campaign was pretty abstract, but it mostly consisted of dark horizon shots, combining the images of 70s suburbia with ominous overtones. The first shot of the flick, though, is of a hardhat wearing man taking down the numbers from a workplace safety sign, which, up until this moment, displayed as the number of days since the last industrial accident, changing from 784 to 1. Playing over the scene is that kind of piano playing you immediately associate with heartstrings being cajoled and coerced into feeling exactly what the director wants you to feel straight up.
So, someone has died on the job, so, we’re already, only a minute of screen time having elapsed, feeling sad for the first person’s head that we’re going to see, connected to that death.
It happens to be a glum-looking boy called Joe (Joel Courtney), who will be our Elliot, our Corey Haim, our Richard Dreyfuss. In the spirit of pastiche, Joe himself looks like a mashing together of the faces of Elijah Wood / Frodo Baggins and Harold from Harold and Maude. He looks so much like Bud Cort that I occasionally found it confusing as to why he hadn’t gotten it on yet with some 80-year-old free spirited woman.
He’s glum because it was his luminous mother that died in that accident, whom he mourns sitting on a step outside the house where her wake is being held. This scene establishes everything emotionally that we’re supposed to know about everyone in the film: Joe misses his mother terribly, his deputy sheriff father (Kyle Chandler) is incapable of expressing his grief, and hides it beneath his stoic exterior, and some asshole probably responsible for the mother’s death (Ron Eldard) is enemy number one as far as the dad is concerned.
Joe isn’t debilitated by his grief, but he holds onto his grief literally, in the form of a locket of his mother’s, which he clutches at moments of high emotional stress. On top of everything else, on top of having lost the person who mattered the most in his world, he has the added misfortune of a best friend who’s fat and therefore obnoxious (Riley Griffiths).
It’s almost like they lifted this chap Charlie bodily and digitally out of The Goonies (where I believe the character was referred to as Chunk). Here, he’s abrasive and annoying, but not borderline retarded, and he’s also an aspiring film maker. He is determined to make a zombie movie, and drafts everyone he can to help him make it, including Joe, who’s good with make-up and special effects. They enlist Alice (Elle Fanning) as both a provider of transportation (no, she’s not the town bike, she just drives a car despite being underage), and as the main love interest in the movie-within-a-movie. Joe is clearly smitten with her, yet the main obstacle to anything happening between them is that she’s the daughter of the man responsible in part for Joe’s mother being killed, and that Joe’s balls haven’t dropped yet, so he could still sing for the Vienna Boy’s Choir without a hitch.
This occurs so early on, and it’s so helpful on the part of the director to take advantage of a teachable moment in order to help us, the great unwashed in the audience, understand how it is these geniuses fool us into giving a good goddamn about their movies: his lead ‘actor’ asks him why there has to be a scene in their movie where husband and wife make goo-goo eyes at each other and speak words of love. Charlie/Chunk explains that the audience has to have a reason to emotionally invest themselves in the characters, so that when bad shit starts happening to them, viewers are affected by it. In other words, he (Abrams) is telling us that that’s why we’re going to endure 40 minutes of these goofy teenagers making a crappy flick before the plot really kicks in.
And when it does, yes, there’s a train crash to rival the plane crash in the pilot episode of Lost, which redefined the concept of excessiveness in going more over-the-top than viewers thought possible. The crash is incredibly well-staged, and presages an action-adventure story whereby the kids involved, especially Joe and Alice, battle both the nefarious activities of the Air Force, and of some kind of creature hellbent on making a mockery of the safe living environment and wholesome Christian values of flat, lifeless Ohio.
[img_assist|nid=1438|title=We give great concern face|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=449|height=253]
I like to think that, to achieve the virtual 1970s look of the film, they didn’t have to even spend that much money on set or production design: all they had to do was find the right place in Ohio, where time hasn’t really passed for the last 30 years.
As strange doings start transpiring, and people and stuff starts going missing, a town hall meeting is conducted, where the citizens of this great town of Lillian can gather together to voice their concerns, to be reassured that everything is going to be all right. A woman gets up and starts screaming “It’s the Soviets! Until we find out any different, it must be the Soviets!” To which everyone gathered loudly agrees.
Ah, what times they were. A gas station attendant puts on the headphones to his new machine, and explains to the sheriff that it’s called a Walkman: you can play your own music and walk around! A personal stereo of one’s own! How kooky was the recent past. How little they realised back then the degree to which our current inventions would make what dazzled people previously vomit with rage in contemplation thereof now. Wow, that’s a complicated sentence, but I think it works grammatically(?) If it doesn’t, then I apologise profusely.
There’s plenty of that kind of stuff littered throughout the flick. Oodles and oodles of it, and, for the most part, it all works fine. There’s even a wedged-in anti-drug statement so transparently hokey that (I hope) it could only be mocking the after-school-specialness of the moment.
The actual creature in this creature feature is secondary to what really matters in the flick, because, in the calculated manner Abrams warned us about at the beginning, the monster and its origins is secondary to the real important stuff that we’re meant to care about, being; will the kids with absent mothers, being both Joe and Alice, resolve their feelings towards their disappointing fathers, will those fathers earn their children’s love back by word or deed, and will Joe and Alice go steady at least for the summer?
It helps that Joe and Alice, at least the kids playing those characters, are so good, how well they sell their roles, and how believably they come across as regular kids. Sure, they’re amalgams of other characters, but every scene in the flick is an amalgam from somewhere else, to such a noble purpose. The interactions between the group of friends works really well too, and I enjoyed the scenes where they’re working on their own flick, which are flat out hilarious in some bits, especially some of the atrocious dialogue Charles comes up with, and the flat, wooden performances of the kids repeating the hackneyed dialogue to camera or in rehearsal, recalling as it does some of the lesser known flicks of the era. Ones less likely to be ‘honoured’ in this way.
It’s funny that, over the course of the same year, there have been two flicks honouring Spielbergo, the other being Paul, which contended the what if? of ‘What if E.T. crashed landed on Earth and was captured by the government, and smoked heaps of dope and swore a lot?’ Here, the what if? is similar, in that it’s contending the same premise, except that it goes the way of “What if E.T. crashed to Earth, was captured and tortured for decades, escaped from activity, and had some justification for killing a whole bunch of people as it tried to phone home?”
The children will save us, apparently, because their true hearts and interspecies empathy is the only thing that might convince the creature in question not to eat us like the headless salted anchovies that we must look like to him/her/it. Let them show us the way.
For such a calculated summer blockbuster, it’s heartening that it actually works. For all that it relies upon what’s gone before, for all the easy seventies classic middle of the road references and pastiches and such, it works well enough on its own, and doesn’t make the fatal mistake of relying on spectacle (which wows no-one anymore) over the characters. I enjoyed it, respected it, and admired the fact that they tried to edit it in a way that’s more early 80s moreso than contemporary times, where three seconds of screen-time can see four or more edits if you’re unlucky.
I raise my glass to Super 8: To simpler times, to more enjoyable and super schmaltzy movies, I salute you.
7 times I thought it wasn’t schmaltzy enough to be truly Spielbergian until the ending with the locket did its thing at the end out of 10
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“Stop talking about production value; the Air Force is going to kill us.” – and so it should – Super 8
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