It's not even officially Summer yet but the best movie of the Summer has already arrived in the Glens Falls area. It's hard to imagine that movies about dancing penguins living in a big city apartment or awful sequels starring guys with names like Shia will manage to beat Super 8 in terms of quality.
Super 8 is a movie about childhood. Movies that truly reflect the experience of being a child are difficult to make since most adults literally forget the complexities and nuances of their younger years and instead choose to embrace an idealized myth in which all was wonderful and even bad memories can be laughed off and spoken of with affection. One of the reasons for this is that children are able to approach even the mundane with a sense of wonder since everything is so new to them. If you're lucky, you keep at least a little of that and take it with you into adulthood. You don't want too much, of course, or else you end up being a 40 year old Justin Bieber fan and even Justin Bieber doesn't want that. Two people who have managed to keep just the right amount of their childhood sensibilities are Super 8's producer and director, Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams.
The movie opens in the town of Lillian, Ohio in the year 1979. We meet Joe Lamb (perfectly cast first time actor Joel Courtney) during a winter made especially bleak by his mother's death. He's only 12 which means he now has to grow up being raised by only his father Jackson, (Kyle Chandler), a Sheriff's Deputy and a good man who tries his best but can't get out of the way of his own grief. Come the Summer, Jackson wants to send Joe away to camp so he won't have to deal with him while school's out despite Joe's wishes to spend the Summer helping his best friend Charles (Riley Griffiths, another first time actor) make an amature monster movie. Jackson is the type of grown up who thinks anything about which he knows little, like movie making, is weird and unnatural so he doesn't want Joe doing it. This just means that Joe will have to sneak out in the middle of the night and do it anyway. Joe and Charles meet to shoot a scene at a local train station along with some of their other friends, friends that include a pretty classmate named Alice Drainard (Elle Fanning) who is also the first girl Joe has a crush on. A train starts coming down the tracks and Charles shows he has the natural instincts of a low budget filmmaker by rushing everyone onto his "set" and filming his scene while he has real world production values. This is long before these kids would all be carrying digital recording devices in their pockets so the whole thing has to be captured on a Super 8 camera, a camera that will end up being an unintended witness not only to a train crash but also the release of a monster.
Oh yeah, the monster. The first 20 minutes of the movie had managed to tell such an engrossing tale of childhood, grief and young love that I'd pretty much managed to forget that Super 8 is a science fiction film about a military train crashing and releasing some sort of monstrous figure they were transporting. If you ever saw the J.J. Abrams produced series Lost then it will come as no surprise to you that this creature is barely seen and has mysterious, frightenting powers though the true villain ends up being an Air Force Colonel named Nelec (Noah Emmerich) who will go to any lengths up to and including murder to retrieve this creature.
It was almost disappointing when Super 8 ceased being a nostalgic coming-of-age tale, "almost" being the operative word. Super 8 is my favorite kind of movie, something rarely seen on the big screen. It's intelligent, serious science fiction driven equally by characters and ideas. It's also an original story that stands out in the sea of sequels and reboots that dominate modern cinema. A bit of foul language, including one use of the F-word, as well as some monster footage that could give kids nightmares earns it a PG-13 rating but it's also nothing kids can't handle if their parents are there with them and, luckily, it's a movie that both kids and parents can enjoy. The big worry is that it will be such a hit that it will inspire sequels based around other outdated recording methods like Betamax and floppy discs but, if that's the price society must pay for a movie like Super 8, it would be worth it.
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