Review: Super 8

Movie plots should never be fully divulged before a viewer sees a movie. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever. (The only exception obviously being adaptations.) The best movie experiences are the unexpected ones, when the audience has no clue what to expect and their illusions and preconceived notions are completely shattered. Filmmakers and studios should really work harder to keep more plots and twists and things of the like secretive, and they should take lessons from JJ Abrams and Super 8.

In nearly every way, Super 8 is a classic Steven Spielberg film that wasn’t written or directed by Spielberg himself. Instead, JJ Abrams took the best elements from Spielberg films: children as lead characters, mysterious non-human beings with questionable intentions, clueless adults that have lost their ability to see things as clearly as their children, the power of unique (and sometimes forbidden) friendships, and the reconciliation of loved ones torn apart. Separately, these elements are not exclusively Spielberg’s, but he combines them in ways unlike any other filmmaker… except now for Abrams. Super 8 seems to be a film homage to the great sci-fi works by Spielberg: E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Jurassic Park, and Minority Report. Abrams took the great elements from this movie, added his own talent for plot twists, flips, and movie monsters, and made a new sci-fi classic out of Super 8. 

The film is set in the late 1970’s and is told through the eyes of Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), a 12 year old boy dealing with the devastating loss of his mother in a small town in Ohio. Joe decides to distract himself by helping his friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) finish his movie so he can send it off to a film festival in Ohio state. Charles enlists the help of Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) to fill a romantic roll in the film, and together along with the rest of their friends, they set off to make a film on Charles’ super 8 camera. During a night of filming at a train station, the kids witness a horrific, but planned, train accident that sets the movie in motion.

The filmmakers succeeded in finding tremendous child actors to take on roles with emotional depth and great professional quality. Each child in this film acted just like a child on film, and were all extremely natural actors. Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney were both exceptionally good, and will definitely find long careers as actors, because they are both immensely talented. Elle Fanning’s career is blooming, and she’s doing a great job building a name for herself aside from just being Dakota Fanning‘s younger sister. The acting in this movie was top notch, and it was made possible because of the richness and depth of the story they were acting. Great acting is nearly always accompanied by great storytelling, and great storytelling needs great acting; this film had both and it shows.

Usually in huge summer action blockbusters, the special effects take center stage in the film, but I’m happy to report that all of the special effects in this film were in their place and didn’t overwhelm the integrity of the story.

Prediction for Oscar Season: Best Picture Nominee, Best Director Nominee, Best Special Effects Nominee, and Best Supporting Actress for Elle Fanning.

Super 8 is the greatest example of a great summer film, and its probably one of the greatest summer films to be made in the past decade. JJ Abrams is setting an example for all filmmakers: write a good story, write good characters, make the chaos of the movie great, and make the audience care about those in the middle of the chaos.

Speculation about ‘Super 8’, JJ Abrams, and that Spielberg guy

I believe that Inception has changed everything about summer action movies. Since that movie roared into theaters and commanded nearly $826 million dollars globally, studios have realized (if they haven’t by now, then they need to check themselves) that audiences want to see big budget action movies with brains. We won’t see the full blown effect of Inception for a few years, but in the mean time, we’ll hopefully be seeing studios experiment more with different types of summer blockbusters. Super 8 has been in the works for a few years now, but I don’t think its much of a stretch to assume that Paramount will be hoping for Inception audiences who are looking for a smarter action film to fill seats.

Besides Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Super 8 is the film I’m most excited to see this summer. I’ve been following this film since I saw the trailer earlier last year. The first trailer was a complete tease, exuding an aura of mystery but inviting tons of curiosity. Immediately after seeing the trailer, the film was added to my ‘must see’ list, and I’ve been following it ever since. The most recent trailer, released to accompany Thor, was less mysterious, and gave the audience more information about the plot. Since seeing Thor last Friday, I’ve watched the trailer a billion more times and have determined a few things: this film has an extreme amount of references to the life and work of Steven Spielberg, this film looks pretty epic, its probably this year’s Inception, and this film is on par to make tons and tons of money. Super 8’s trailer is the perfect mix of mystery and introduction; it introduces the story but it doesn’t tell the story. I don’t buy into the belief that trailers need to tell the viewers everything about a movie, like the makers of Letters to Juliet seem to believe (that movie bugged me immensely due to the fact that the ENTIRE plot of the film was told in the trailer and it was completely predictable), but I believe that trailers should give audiences enough information to be intrigued about the film and leave the rest to imagination.

Even though Spielberg is producing Super 8 and helped write the story (though he doesn’t have a writing credit), this film looks like a very huge homage to the contemporary filmmaking giant. I find this interesting because not all younger directors (and film school students) seem to love Spielberg for whatever crazy reason. They call him too Hollywood, too commercial, too mainstream, or they just hate him for killing the last Indiana Jones movie. To me, Steven Spielberg is one of the most fascinating contemporary directors to study because his films have always straddled the line between art and commercialism. A Spielberg film is nearly guaranteed to rack in the dough, but a Spielberg film will also be a feast for the eyes, a stimulator for the mind, or at the very least, a damn good time.

Most people that I’ve met who are fans of the New Hollywood Generation blame Spielberg for the end of the creative renaissance of the 1970s by making  the first summer blockbuster, Jaws. Spielberg and Jaws changed everything in the commercial film industry by doing one simple thing: making the summer box office period the most important period of the year in terms of finances. Universal Pictures decided to wide release Jaws instead of going with a traditional slow opening; Jaws opened in 464 theaters on June 20, 1975 by July 25th, it was open in 675 theaters, the largest distribution of a single film at that time. It became the first film to reach $100 million dollars in box office receipts. After Jaws, studios looked towards big, conceptual action summer films to make them a lot of money in the summer. Spielberg’s Jaws is his biggest demonstration of commercialism filmmaking, even though he didn’t intend it to be.

Spielberg’s other commercial successes include E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Jurassic Park, which both broke box office records around their time of release. The Indiana Jones series is also under Spielberg’s belt, as well as The Color Purple, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (a film that doesn’t get enough credit in my eyes), Catch Me if You Can, and many, many, many more. His filmography is eclectic, it ranges from commercial successes to masterpiece filmmaking, and somehow, all of his films somehow have a connecting Spielberg touch.

Spielberg likes to tell the story that Cecil B DeMille inspired him to become a filmmaker through the film The Greatest Show on Earth. Spielberg’s earliest films were filmed on fathers old Super 8 camera, and in homage to DeMille, Spielberg’s first film starred his train set, mimicking scenes from The Greatest Show on Earth. He speaks highly of his childhood experiences with his Super 8 camera, and how much he loved making movies out of everything around him, including his toy train set. He was fascinated by aliens and events that were not of this world; he was an extremely dedicated early filmmaker, and spent hours making movies on his Super 8 camera.

I don’t know much about Abrams’ life prior to filmmaking (I do plan on learning more in the future), but I do know that he wrote Super 8, and I also know a little too much about Spielberg’s life story. I connect the two because I have seen the Super 8 trailer more times than I’m willing to count, and there are some extreme similarities to the plot of the film and Spielberg. I have only seen the trailer for this film, and have not done any further research to validate the claims I will soon be making, this is just a pretty well thought out hypothesis.

Spielberg grew up in a small town in Ohio, the film is based in a small town in Ohio (a small coincidence, but significant).

The main character looks like what I’d imagine a young Spielberg to look like.

The boy uses a Super 8 camera to film a movie involving a train.

The train has some type of non-human thing in it; a huge element to many Spielberg films (Jaws, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Jurassic Park). The outer/adult world sees the non-human creature as an evil threat, but the children see the non-human creature as something more intriguing and complex than that. And I suspect that this film has a lot of similarities to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I noticed in the trailer that a man sees something that only the child believes and that there is a place where the characters want to journey to in order to confirm the existence of the aliens (or other non-human creature). Prior to seeing Super 8 in theaters, I plan on watching  Close Encounters to count the similarities to confirm my suspicions.

I don’t think that Super 8 is a copy of Spielberg’s work/life, but I believe it to be a very large homage to the life and work of one of the greatest Hollywood directors of our time. Abrams is a really creative filmmaker, and I expect this film (with all its Spielberg influence) to be one of the pieces Abrams makes.

(P.S. I will always be looking for ways to talk about Inception since I feel Christopher Nolan was robbed.)

(P.S.S. I hope no one minds.)

(P.S.S.S. Actually, I don’t care if someone minds.)