“Super 8”… Back to the Past

Like many of us, the director JJ Abrams is a fan of the early Steven Spielberg, but unlike many of us, he has fashioned a feature-length fan mail in the form of Super 8. Someone should have told him that other people’s outpourings of adoration, much like other people’s Facebook updates, are interesting only for a while, and once our voyeuristic instincts are spent, the attention begins to stray. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Super 8 is set in 1979, the year Spielberg was inspired by the events of over three decades ago to come up with 1941, and Abrams wants to emulate even this time frame. It is now a little over three decades since we experienced the idyll of 1979. The story, the conceit of Super 8 is this: the authority-figure father from Jaws is reduced to a single parent like the mom in E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial. His son is like the boy in E.T., sensitive and craving a special kind of connection. Their tranquil suburbia is invaded by the id-monster from Jaws, which may just be a benevolent outer-space visitor like the creatures in E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Apart from these broad story arcs, Abrams invests his film with extraordinarily specific themes and images from the films Spielberg produced and/or directed – which means we get the boys on bicycles from E.T., the girl in front of a television set from Poltergeist, the government cover-up from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the snooping kids and the underground tunnel from The Goonies, the sideswiped vehicle whose passengers are terrorised from Jurassic Park, the yearning for missing dads and moms, and perhaps even the ragtag band scouring a blitzed-out town from Saving Private Ryan. The homages are so explicit and so numerous that the film, after a point, begins to feel like product placement for the Spielberg oeuvre. You begin to see Spielbergisms everywhere. That token black man – is he a nod to Danny Glover in The Color Purple? We keep waiting for the town’s Jews to be rounded up and squeezed into Kraków-bound trains, only to be saved by an archaeologist with a bullwhip and a fedora.

I’ve dwelt at length on this aspect of Super 8 because that is all there is to it. The plot is but a clothesline to prop up a laundry list of Spielberg nostalgia. Super 8 begins with a splendid evocation of not just the era as we remember it from the movies but also the rhythms of the era. The initial scenes unfold with such restraint and with so little amplification that we’re reminded, rudely, of how brisk and how loud the movies have gotten. (Indeed, has there been a quieter blockbuster than Close Encounters of the Third Kind?) Abrams, in these portions, is attuned to the Spielbergian specialty of grave children gravitating towards adulthood. Young Joe (Joel Courtney, leading a fine cast), the protagonist who’s lost his mother, declines an invitation to dine with a friend’s large and rambunctious family, only to come home and find his father weeping in the bathroom. One parent is dead; the other is dysfunctional.

Joe’s escape arrives in the form of escapist cinema, a schlocky zombie movie that is being cobbled together on Super 8 mm film by Joe’s best friend Charles (Riley Griffiths), along with a band of buddies. This stretch – with the young team enlisting Alice (Elle Fanning) because every narrative, even one with zombies, needs a “wife” – is endearing, and the finished product, which appears over the closing credits, is easily the best part of Super 8. Meanwhile, outside, a mystery is gradually established, an otherworldly series of events that demands a rational explanation. But as the fake monster movie being made by Charles and Company mutates into a real monster movie, all the fun drains away. The enormous build-up leads to a hackneyed conclusion that seems to occur on its own, with apparently little use for the characters we have come to know. The truly frustrating aspect of Super 8 is that Abrams is so busy referencing Spielberg that he forgets to channel his virtuosic ability to wring emotion from the most jaded hearts.  We watch the film from a distance, dry-eyed, as if it were something created by the assembly line from AI: Artificial Intelligence.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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Posted in: Cinema: English