Nostalgia is a wonderful drug. It’s warm, fuzzy, romantic, and kindles misty-eyed daydreaming, looking on the past through a lens that softly filters even the hard times until they take on a warmer, richer color. Or, if you’re JJ Abrams, one that blots out the screen in blue lens flares of every imaginable shape and size.
Okay, I’m being a little unfair to Abrams; there’s a lot more to his aesthetic than light refraction tricks, and I actually have a slightly guilty affinity for a little (or even a lot of) well-placed flare. But those blooms of blue light shifting and spreading across the screen do serve a specific purpose in Super 8, and it’s the same purpose served by nearly every aspect of the movie: to lovingly recall the late ’70s/early ’80s work of Steven Spielberg, who also happens to serve as a producer on the film.
Those flares, and the nervy anxiety of a shadowy military force operating in small town America with impunity directly recall Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The notion of kids having a closer, more genuine relationship to their emotions, and therefore sometimes having the better judgement in certain crisis situations, recalls E.T., and those kids also being a band of freaks and geeks with a penchant for troublemaking and adventure takes you right back to The Goonies.
Kids growing up in broken homes is a standard trope in the Spielberg filmography, and this film opens on the breaking of the Lamb household, as an industrial accident in this small-town Ohio steel mill has killed Elizabeth, mom to Joe (Joel Courtney) and wife to Jackson (Kyle Chandler). Across town, there’s another broken home in play, with Alice (Elle Fanning) and her alcoholic father Louis (Ron Eldard) also without a wife or mother. There’s a connection between these two families that goes beyond Joe’s puppy love crush on Alice — a mystery that Abrams draws out, a habit that Abrams fans are well used to after waiting months or years for reveals large and small in Lost.
The central mystery of the film is just what it is that was on a military train that derails on the edge of town just as Joe, Alice, and their band of buddies are filming a scene in the super 8 zombie movie that young director Charles hopes to enter in a teen film festival. All the kids escape the massive disaster of flying boxcars and exploding fuel tanks alive and mostly unharmed. That super 8 camera sustains some damage, but not before it captures the entirety of the crash — most importantly some things the military doesn’t want anyone seeing. Not that the kids know what they’ve got: this is 1979, the film in that movie camera needs to be developed, and in the three days it takes to get it back, people, pets and mechanical equipment and appliances begin disappearing all over town, while the military tightens its restrictions and investigations. They’re looking for something that’s missing from that train, and not even they know that the kids have it all on film yet.
This is expertly made sci-fi adventure filmmaking here, and Abrams displays the same grasp of taut pacing and visual spectacle that made his Star Trek reboot such a surprising success. That film, like this one, was driven by a genuine adoration of the source material. But what’s missing from Super 8 is Abrams’ playful subversion of the original formula. Star Trek was full of surprises that supplemented the expert filmmaking and great chemistry of the cast.
The filmmaking chops are still here, as is the chemistry: Courtney is the perfect awkwardly geeky everykid, and Fanning is really pretty extraordinary as the broken girl from a broken home. Between this and her performance in Somewhere last year, I don’t think it’s a stretch to predict she’s got Oscar-caliber work in her future. Together, the two are dynamite. The rest of the players in the ensemble are largely filling in stock characters, but they still do so with heart and humor.
What isn’t here is the sense of surprise, that anything could be around the next corner. To say that a movie that’s this well made is also very conventional might not be as much of a knock with a lot of other directors. Whether it’s fair to Abrams or not, we’ve come to expect a little more from him, and as likeable as both the movie and the characters were, the film still failed to connect for me on the gut emotional level of a Close Encounters or a Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And that’s part of the problem with nostalgia: its inherent passivity. While there’s nothing wrong with looking back on 30-year-old Spielberg flicks, or 60-year-old sci-fi B-movies with rosy adoration — they earned that adoration, after all — doing so to the point of subverting your own artistic voice isn’t a great idea. Abrams lets memories of the past take the reins on this project instead of maintaining an active, forward-looking role himself. The result is a good film in the place of one that might have been great.
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Super 8
Written and directed by JJ Abrams
Starring Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Ron Eldard
Running time: 112 minutes
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and some drug use.
Opens today at theaters across the area.
