Super 8
Union Square Regal 14, June 23, 2011
Movie #38 for 2011
Writer/director J. J. ABRAMS (Star Trek) clearly adores early Spielberg movies. Both the writing and direction of Super 8 are all-Spielberg all the time. It’s more than imitation, though, it’s a new mastery of an effective style.
Joe (new comer JOEL COURTNEY, pictured, right) is grieving the recent death of his mum in a mill accident and his mostly-absent deputy sheriff dad (KYLE CHANDLER, Friday Night Lights) is not coping at all. Set in small town Ohio in 1979 (and evocative of the time without being nostalgic), the first half of the film centres on Joe and his friends, making a short zombie movie over the summer holiday. Filming at the train station one night, they see an epic train crash which seems to start off a sequence of bizarre events around town, prompting the military to move in as things get destroyed and people disappear.
The kids, the parents and the town are all very, very well done, and the young actors strike a terrific realistic style, a la The Goonies. I was convinced by the slowly building tension as it ran in tandem with character development, but at about the two-thirds mark, the film dumps it’s characters in favor of monster-movie action, losing much of my interest.
I love that Abrams is a fan of the camera crane and a big, chaotic set (nothing expresses chaos like actual chaos). And his action set pieces are very good too - especially the train accident at the beginning (so many ‘splosions!). But these are things I already knew about him. It’s nice to know, too, that he can develop characters and convincingly realistic relationships. Even if he can’t yet sustain them for an entire film.
