Ever since I saw the teaser trailer attached to Iron Man 2 over a year ago, I have been anxiously awaiting Super 8, Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams’ cinematic lovechild. Would it be Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets Cloverfield like everyone anticipated or would it be something original orchestrated by the two veterans? The answer is neither, but the outcome does not disappoint.
Set in the summer of 1979 in the small town of Lillian, Ohio, Super 8 follows a group of middle school-aged friends making a zombie detective film together. Joe (Joel Courtney), the son of sheriff deputy Jackson (Kyle Chandler), is still recovering from the tragic loss of his mother in an industrial accident four months prior. Despite his father’s wishes for him to attend baseball camp and make some new friends, Joe stays in town to help writer/director Charles (Riley Griffiths) finish the film. Along with Carey (Ryan Lee), Preston (Zach Mills), Martin (Gabriel Basso), and the recent addition of Alice (Elle Fanning), the kids head out to an old train depot one night to film a pivotal scene and end up capturing the collision of a pick-up truck and an Air Force freight train. The wreckage reveals to the kids the train’s bizarre cargo and the truck’s driver, an honor’s biology teacher at the middle school, warns them not to speak of the incident. However, as the Air Force moves in to secure the situation and the residents of Lillian become tormented by supernatural occurrences, the young friends take it upon themselves to figure out what exactly the military is working to hide.
Super 8 perfectly captures the youthful wonderment inherent, but by no means exclusive, to the time in which it takes place, making me nostalgic for a childhood reminiscent of Joe and his friends’. The aesthetics of the time period paired with the universal theme of friendship––which is undoubtedly guided by Spielberg’s hand in the film (ET, anyone?)––keeps the story grounded in a relatable reality as the sci-fi aspects of the plot unfold. On the whole, Super 8 maintains a nice balance between action and heart and is well-paced from start to finish. However, for a film that clocks in at almost two hours long, many of the relationships and key plot points are surprisingly left underdeveloped and underexplained in the end. For example, Jackson and Joe go from being at odds to bonding as father and son, but I cannot seem to buy how the change in their relationship occurs. Likewise, the resolution to the film’s overarching conflict happens far too easily and winks at the audience far too blatantly, even for a film as digestible as this one. I wish I could have earned the moral of the story, but instead Abrams handed it me on a silver platter.
As a sci-fi film that delivers the thrills of the genre but remains deeply rooted in the importance of family and friendship, Super 8 is an entertaining summer blockbuster for all audiences.
Rating: 4/5
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