The Jerusalem Film Festival’s producers wisely chose to cut through the pretention this year with a relatively zippy ceremony and Super–8, a film that was actually made to be seen on a huge screen with 3000 people who are trying to ignore the fact that they’re freezing.
J.J. Abrams – creator of Lost, Alias, Fringe and director of Mission: Impossible 3 and Star Trek – wrote and directed Super-8; and in particular directed it at Steven Spielberg, who also produced the film, which is an attempt to recapture film-goers collective imagination in the same way that Spielberg’s classic early films did. Abrams takes Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind, crashes it into E.T., mixes it up by throwing in Cloverfield and The Host, and fills in the gaps with The Goonies. The film is not shy about showing its touchstones – its raison d’etre – and its plot or characters are not particularly creative or even all that interesting. With those strikes against him, one must give Abrams enormous credit for his enthusiasm, his taste, his film-sense and his talent; as this film manages to be some kind of wonderful, and, in a way, the freshest summer blockbuster in ages.
The film is set in 1979, in a fictional Ohio, suburban, middle-class town. 13-year old Joe Lamb’s (Joel Courtney) mother has just died in an accident, leaving Joe alone with his emotionally distant father (Kyle Chandler), the deputy sheriff of the town. A few months go by, and Joe’s friend Charles (Riley Griffiths), gets together a few friends to make a super-8 zombie film. Having hit upon the idea that having a love interest would help, Charles convinces Alice (Elle Fanning), a girl from school with a drunkard father, to play the hero’s wife. Both Joe and Alice are motherless with hard fathers, and very quickly become good friends, even though their fathers dislike one another and forbid the friendship.
This first section of the film is well-calibrated, and put me firmly in the E.T. mind space, where the town is small and safe, yet with limitless possibilities of a 13 year-olds imagination (it also brought back fond memories of a time in life and in the movies when kids say “shit” often and are thrilled to be getting away with it). And just like in E.T., the alien arrives when a truck drives into a train in one of the most chaotic and loudest scenes of mayhem ever seen…and for a moment there, it feels like J.J. Abrams is channeling his own production of the monster movie Cloverfield, or the young Spielberg’s future production of Michael Bay’s monstrous Transformers movies. But only briefly, for Abrams quickly regains his footing in the most impressive achievement of the film.
Recalling and rekindling the innocence and wonder of E.T. or CEOT3K is difficult enough, but it is remarkable that Abrams manages to keep the same tone after the destruction starts, the people go missing, the dogs run away and the army invades. It’s a delicate balance, and it costs Abrams the ending of the film, but the hour or so that he manages to keep it up for is pretty magical. My biggest fear for this film – that it would feel oh so 80’s and knowing – never materialized. Abrams’ feel for the material flags in other ways, but there is an essential purity in his vision.
The big ugly alien that drives the film arrives in the middle on a night when the kids are filming their zombie film. Yet it doesn’t stop the show – although they now have seen some pretty heavy stuff, and are kind of traumatized, they continue with the film, using the aftermath of the incident for the sake of ‘production value’ (as the director always calls it). They frame scenes against the crash site, and use the Air Force men who swarm the town as extras (in a particularly witty set-up).
These Air Force men are not the faceless but essentially curious army people from Close Encounters – the shameless brute force they employ is one of the few tells that this film was made from a point of view different than Spielberg’s in that era. Even when the army was instigating a huge cover up in the earlier film, they did it through deception and with wit. The soldiers here are presented far more cynically – as if they saw Close Encounters, took a few pointers, and applied a viciousness that was shockingly blunt, to the extent that Abrams luxuriates over images of soldiers being utterly destroyed. This angry, snarling presentation is also emblematic of Spielberg, going from Close Encounters to War of The Worlds, and is one of the least pleasant aspects of the film.
At a certain point, the film gives into the War of the Worlds Spielberg, but without the context of September 11th (which that film was a direct response to), it just feels mean and ugly. It’s like the terrifying home-invasion sequence in E.T., only on a larger scale, and there’s actual destruction going on. It is at times dazzlingly realized, but Abrams incorrectly assumes that his audience still feels in safe hands narratively afterwards, and he is sorely mistaken. This destruction makes way for an ambitious finale, one that is visually breathtaking, but also dramatically forced and rushed and inept and just plain stupid.
And yet…that did not sink the film. It failed to satisfy in narratively, yet the narrative was not what was so wonderful about the rest of the film. It is a movie that is in love with movies, yet not in a solipsistic way (well…not entirely). It is not merely a return to some great 30 year old films, not just an exercise in nostalgia. At its best – and it’s at its best for quite a while- it is an excitingly alive movie, and alive in a different way than your typical summer movie is nowadays. X-Men: First Class is a terrific summer movie from this year, but it is notable for doing everything everyone else does, just much better. Super-8 touches upon the wide-eyed glee and wonder that were in those early Spielberg films. It never gets there, but there are scenes that make one simply look up and say “wow”, like the characters in the film.
Abrams is not a great screenwriter, but he has taken the excitement he brought to Star Trek, and taken it someplace deeper, even more primal. The terrific design sense of Star Trek here is felt much more, in the construction of the shots. His sequences are still choppy, but his individual shots are quite marvelous. Even small sequences, like one where Alice is running away from her house on her bike, with her father chasing after her, are thrillingly constructed. And like Spielberg, he at times is overly reliant on the score, by Michael Giacchino, but similar to those scores, this one is generally too damn pleasurable to complain about (aside from the ending, where the movie just didn’t earn the swell).
