Ryan McNeil
The worst part about growing up is how much harder we become to entertain. We find ourselves cynical, unimaginative and restless…needing unlimited options and only the very best to pass the time.
If you’re like me, and you think back on your youth, you might recall that it wasn’t always so.
SUPER 8 begins by introducing us to Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney). As we enter the story, Joe’s mother has just been killed in a workplace accident, leaving his father Deputy Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler) to care for him alone. We then push on to the beginning of the summer, where Joe is passing the time by helping his friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) make a zombie film using a super 8 camera.
Charles actually has a whole crew made up of neighbourhood kids, including a pyrotechnician, a boom operator, and a handful of actors. Rounding out the crew is Alice (Elle Fanning) – their leading lady and driver. Joe seems to have a soft spot for young Alice, and the two have the sort of timid friendship that boys and girls have at age thirteen.
One night while filming a scene near the train tracks, the kids find themselves witness to a happening. Just as a speeding freight train passes the platform the kids are filming from, it collides with a pickup truck and causes a massive train wreck.
That’s bad enough, but things get worse for the small town in a hurry. Dogs flee from their owners, items like car engines and stoves start disappearing from local businesses. And worst of all, people are going missing. All of it seems to have something to do with the train crash, and unbeknownst to the kids, Charles’camera may have captured the truth.
What delighted me most about SUPER 8 was the way director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg used it to act like kids again. As the film plays out, we quickly start to see that they are making the sort of film that Charles would make. Did you and your friends ever go a playground, or a wooded area and play army? Or astronauts? If you have, then what you imagined as a child was what Abrams and Spielberg have realized on the screen. It goes beyond reminding you of the films you watched as a kid: It actually reminds you of being a kid.
What’s more, is that the film takes us back to a very specific time in our childhood. The boys and Alice are all in that twilight of childhood; that brief window when you’re old enough to love, but too young to lust. As such, watching Alice and Joe share the screen brings with it a wonderful tenderness. She’s the key to bringing Joe out of himself, and being the spark he needs to grow up just a little bit. To paraphrase a Stephen King story, for Joe she is the girl by which all future girls will be measured.
These threads of youth are what elevate SUPER 8 into being more than just another knock-off thriller. Make no mistake – its influences are easy to spot. However, by setting the film in the late 70’s when he was a kid, Abrams is able to dive deeper into dealing with the events of the plot the way a kid would. The quiet tension between Joe and Jackson is palpable, as is the camaraderie of the kids. As such, we can relate to what how the train wreck might underscore how the Lamb family is adrift, and likewise how the boys are all completely willing to rally to do what needs to be done.
Taking all of that adolescent truth and using it to underscore a sci-fi matinee special is a rarity. The film excites and delights when it should, that’s just good execution. Taking all that excitement and delightfulness and making our hearts well up at the same time, that’s great storytelling. SUPER 8 doesn’t want to just scare us, or make us look to the skies – it knows that other films have already done that.
What it wants to do instead is remind us of the first time we watched those movies. It wants us to remember the age where movies like those affected us the most – when we truly believed. It wants us to think about what it was like before we connected with our friends through networks. It wants us to remember that too-fleeting time when we always spent time face-to-face, and were bound only by our imagination and determination.
To that end, the film is a wonderful success. We remember that time well, and we remember it fondly.