I can see what J.J. Abrams was trying to do with Super 8. Truly, I do. The movie he has made, alas, is unsuccessful in living up that vision. Abrams longs for another one of those boys’ adventures’ that dominated the box office in the 1980’s: Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future (1985), Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) and Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985). Many of those films—if not all of them—were great pieces of cinematic art, and Abrams has hoped to pay tribute to them with a film that nostalgically evokes the tastes and talents of that decade. Super 8, unfortunately, fails both as art and as nostalgia.
Abrams remembers a time when movies could send juvenile characters off on adventures that were full of excitement and imagination. And yet Super 8 brings back none of those memories. It doesn’t have the comedic genius of Zemeckis’ Back to the Future or the surrealistic nightmares of Dante’s Gremlins or Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes. It is far, FAR away from the visual and meditative brilliance of Spielberg’s E.T., even though Spielberg has given Abrams his blessing by serving as executive producer on this latest film. Super 8 appears to be most enamored with the noisiness and crass storytelling of The Goonies—by far the weakest of the boys’ adventures from the 80’s. But where the Richard Donner movie sent its heroes down on an underground adventure of nonstop thrills, Abrams’ Super 8 is a movie constantly interrupted by reality, as its heroes are yanked out of their adventures time and time again to endure the mind-numbing lectures of the movie’s clueless, superfluous adult characters.
In many ways, this is the movie’s first major misstep. Too much of Super 8 is told from the point of view of adults—people who do not possess the ability to perceive the kind of imaginative world Abrams is trying to pay tribute to. We get a lot of tiresome scenes, then, of the hardened police officer arguing with his son, the white-trash drunk arguing with his daughter, the cops arguing with the military, the military arguing with the suspect, and so on. Abrams has brought too much realism into a genre where realism is not called for.
The scenes featuring the intrusions of the local military are certainly true to the conventions of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), another sci-fi film that was, indeed, told from the point of view of adults. But the Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon characters in that film were naïve, idealistic adults open to the concept that there was something waiting, way out there, ready to be discovered. The adults in Super 8, on the contrary, are all mean-spirited non-believers. When the kids try to tell the adults something important, the adults ignore them. When the kids try to form long-lasting bonds with one another, the adults attempt to step in and break them up. Such cranky adult characters are not true to the boys’ adventures of the 80’s; this is merely, yet again, Abrams making up his own ideas, tarnishing a genre that could use a little more imaginative simplicity.
The adults in Super 8 wouldn’t be so bothersome if the children themselves could hold our attention. The most inspired child character in Super 8 is Charles (Riley Grifiths), the director kid who is obsessed with the John Carpenter/George A. Romero horror flicks of the 70’s and longs to direct an amateur picture of his own that will launch his filmmaking career. Had Super 8 been told from Charles’ point of view, the movie would no doubt have worked better as an homage to the young directors of the 70’s and 80’s whose love for cinema sparked at an early age. And yet Abrams, perhaps fearing that the audience would never identify with a director kid, has told Super 8 from the point of view of Joe (Joel Courtney), the miserable, motherless kid with no dreams and no ambition who spends most of the movie lusting after Alice (Elle Fanning) despite the protests of both of their fathers. The budding romance between Joe and Alice preoccupies Abrams’ narrative when he should be more focused on young Charles and his filmmaking ambitions.
One last thing. I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but there is an easily-missed moment in Super 8 in which Abrams—who made his career as the television producer of Alias and Lost—inadvertently reveals his own true feelings about all directors in general. This scene has Joe and Alice, now very much in love with each other, complaining about Charles being "too bossy" of a director, believing it would do Charles a lot of good if somebody were to confront him and tell him to stop exerting so much control over his movie—even though it’s, well, his movie. It’s really saying something when Abrams hates directors so much that he’s even having kids complain about them in a movie he has written & directed himself.
This is why it’s getting annoying to hear Abrams being praised by critics these days as "the next Spielberg" when Abrams doesn’t even share Spielberg’s overflowing love for directing. Abrams actually has a lot more in common with somebody like George Lucas, another former writer/director who created his own fantasy worlds and then coasted on them for the remainder of his career, fed up with directing as a profession. I don’t doubt that Abrams enjoys directing movies occasionally, but all three of the films he has directed to date (Mission: Impossible III; Star Trek; Super 8) have been little more than amusing but severe artistic misfires. If Abrams went back to his former life as a successful television producer, I have a sneaky feeling he’d be a lot happier.
Runtime: 112 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, language and some drug use).
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