Review: Super 8

This week marks the return of director JJ Abrams to the summer movie scene with the cryptically-advertised Super 8. Abrams, who proved himself a more than capable action director with 2009’s Star Trek, charts new territory here, backed by the steady hand of producer Steven Spielberg. Indeed, the film resonates with Spielberg’s blockbuster mindset, as well as his characteristic love of filmmaking in general. It is a wonderfully entertaining film, spectacularly filmed and acted, and crafted with all the joy and care of the films it skillfully evokes.

Set in small-town Ohio in the late seventies, Super 8 follows a group of children who, while trying to make an amateur zombie film, are witnesses to the start of a terrifying chain of events that soon has the town itself tearing apart at the seams. The plot begins in earnest with a train crash, an accident whose implications I will not reveal here. The scene is filmed about as perfectly as it is possible to film a horrible accident, and is one of the best action sequences to hit the screen in years. The reason for this is because the scene it is comprised of shots that for a cohesive unit of action, rather than just a set of incomprehensible takes glued into a loud blur. Abrams knows what it is to show his audience something of this magnitude; he understands that we want to actually see what happens, not just have it implied to us through overwhelming cacophony and distorted explosions. Michael Bay could use Super 8 as a text for his next overlong, soporific robot orgy.

From there, the film takes off into a plot that draws on action, horror, and drama. Abrams builds his picture with exacting detail, filling the screen with sights and sounds of the era, and people who make the world feel real and alive and afraid. The conspiracy is intriguing, but more compelling is the human story here. The film’s young main character, Joe Lamb, recently lost his mother and feels no connection to his father, the town’s deputy. Officer Lamb tells his son about a baseball camp he knows Joe would like, despite the fact that Joe spends his free time making models and fake blood for his friends’ movies. Joe, meanwhile, finds a friend in Alice, who puts Joe into a trance even covered in zombie makeup. The two share a common ordeal in their distant fathers, but the tenderness of the friendship is deepened through the trauma of the film’s central adventure. It works because they care for each other, and the audience cares about their survival. Action is meaningless if we’re not sympathetic to the people involved; Abrams knows this, and uses the fact well.

Eventually, the conspiracy becomes something bigger than the town itself. The horror is kept out of sight just long enough to make it real, a technique that Spielberg mastered long ago and to which Abrams pays homage here. The revelation comes to the characters not through firsthand experience, but through the lens of a camera. The film has a curious way of framing its visuals in a way that is both deliberately constructed and entirely natural. From the theater, we feel as though we sit behind the camera, watching the action unfold in realtime. And at its heart, that’s what Super 8 is about: the pleasure of the moving image, and its power to expose reality in new and amazing ways. The young actors perform in ways that seem more genuine than such people might behave in the real world. The camera brings out their sadness and desire, so carefully hidden away from the world of their daily lives. In the end, the meat of Super 8 resides in the power of that revelation, the magic of the moving picture to make sorrow and fear and love real to the audience, and to make the world just a little bit clearer.