I'll try to keep the word Spielberg to a minimum here, but truth be told, J.J. Abrams' sweetly nostalgic Super 8 is as blatant and reverent an homage as you could conceive, for better or worse. -
Combining the small-town discovery of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the children's-adventure viewpoint of The Goonies, Super 8 easily (and knowingly) finds that magic of youthful innocence and childhood wonder against the backdrop of spooky exploration.
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Perhaps far more enjoyable for its delicate coming-of-age portrait of a family than its cacophonous, overblown creature-feature dressings, the film is at once too much of a Spielberg thing and yet not enough of it.
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Beginning with the derailment of a passing train and the root of the town of Lillian's oncoming problems, the scene is unavoidably overstated and illogically staged, which is starkly adverse to the kind of slow-burn aesthetic that Spielberg so welcomed in his early days.
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Conversely, the film's child stars, lead by Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning, are nothing short of breathtaking in their roles which require some startling intimacy and emotion, a common trait of Spielberg's films that holds true here.
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In fact, Joel Courtney's Joe Lamb, the imaginative, romantic teenage lead, could easily be considered a portrait of Spielberg himself (an obsessive genre geek, a train-set enthusiast and an admirer of the Fannings), just another added element to this indebted, appreciative puzzle.
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Inevitably, Super 8 might be too slavishly admiring of its own influence (and even its own additions are not entirely welcome), but its heart, its big gushing heart, is unequivocally in the right place. [B+]
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Abrams remembers the simple rule that a majority of his contemporaries have forgotten: action and mayhem have meaning only when an audience cares about the people trapped within the maelstrom. And I cared for all of these characters, even that drunk dad that gets arrested in the beginning. Nice Review! Check out mine when you get a chance!
ReplyDeleteThis time executive producer Stephen Spielberg and J.J Abrams team up for what they hope to be the surprise hit of the summer and boy were they definitely correct in what they promised for. The project titled "Super 8" in reference to the cameras used in the 1970's hence the camera the children use in this film. The plot line is evoked by an incredible and dare I say dazzling scene of a train crash incident where the United States Air Force had its precious cargo transferred to a facility in Ohio in the summer of 1979. No one knows of what is upon them aside from the terrible accident. Or was it? I'm not going to give anything away because this type of film only comes in once in every ten years and I for one did appreciate its artful beauty for what it was and for what it became to be. Its a cinematically rewarding film due to the direction and the tone driven throughout credit to J.J Abrams on that. To me the film is a memorabilia of what the science-fiction genre was back in the 1970's and 1980's. The resonance that the film had was to that of the children and how they led the whole movie which makes you remember of the good old days of those good old movies of adventure.
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