Movie review: Super 8
I actually saw this Friday night but have been distracted by a number of things this weekend, including moving two refrigerators and a couch. I am always glad to help my friends, but moving a refrigerator is a favor on an entirely different scale from say picking someone up at the airport. Anyway, that’s all done and I have been completely lazy today, so in order to feel like I didn’t just waste most of my weekend I am going to push this out.
Let me say I was hoping to hate this movie. I harbor some ill feelings toward J.J. Abrams for his treatment of my precious Star Trek, and was hoping to be able to deliver forth a bitter and evil review. Unfortunately for me but fortunately for the movie going population Super 8 is actually pretty fun and good to watch. But, like most movies, it has its issues.
Super 8 is the Frankenstein monster assembled from the dead body parts of E.T. the Extraterestrial, Stand By Me, Goonies, and (weirdest of all) Alien. And like Frankenstein, something was created that at times was really cool and exciting, but the value of the whole fails to exceed the sum of the component parts. It is obviously an homage to Speilberg, in the same way a fan boy dressing like a fat Spiderman is an homage to Stan Lee. The problem is, while it obviously took it’s inspiration most from E.T., it doesn’t really compare to that brilliant film. (E.T. image courtesy of the sci fi t shirts category).
I think I have figured out J.J. Abrams; he is the guy who in each movie gets something amazing right and a lot of other stuff stupendously wrong. The main thing he got wrong in this film is a real lack of tone. One minute you are watching a bunch of kids awkwardly bumble through early teen years (Stand by Me), the next they are riding around on dilapidated bicycles trying to solve the mystery that plagues their town (Goonies), then they are odds with the military while dealing with an alien (E.T.), and then they are being stalked by a terrifying creature of unimaginable horror (Alien). You spend the whole movie never really knowing how you are supposed to be feeling. It’s like taking a shower in a house with 20 toilets being flushed all the time, except that instead of water the shower alternates between liquid nitrogen and super heated plasma (or, as I like to think of it, my experience dating a typical woman).
Anyway, the film. Couple spoilers in this, so skip a few if you find them annoying. The year is 1979 (a fact hamhandedly delivered to us by a newscast referencing Three Mile Island) and a group of kids in a small town in Ohio are filming a zombie movie. The kids run the Goonies gambit of characters; there’s the fat nerd directing the film, the glasses wearing main star of the 8mm film who pukes at the first sign of anything, the weedy braces pyromaniac kid who handles all the explosions and special effects, the completely unremarkable camera kid, the makeup kid who is the movie main character and son of a local deputy, and the super cute white trash girl who gets pulled in to make the film. The events are a few months after Joe, the main kid, has his mother get killed in an industrial accident that Alice, the cute girls, father was somehow involved it. The two fathers hate each other and both have estranged relationships with their kids. Anyway, the gang all sneak out to film near a train track where they see the biggest, longest, most explosive filled train wreck ever (I don’t think I have ever seen a freight train travel at 80 mph. Most train wrecks I have seen end with all the cars lying on the side of the rail, not flying through the air into an explosion that would embarrass Micheal Bey). The train is an Air Force train (something Joe can tell by noticing what kind of hooks they have on the cars (???)) and some kind of creature manages to escape. Somehow several platoons of Air Force guys teleport to the accident before any kind of local police or firefighters arrive and chase the kids off.
The town becomes gripped in terror as the creature kidnaps and does something vague with the local citizens (the movie was really ill defined on this point. It seemed to imply that he was eating them, or perhaps keeping them around for telepathic company, or perhaps even using them to power his nefarious works. I really can’t tell you what was going on). It’s also stealing random metal stuff (again, very vague how he accomplishes this. At once point he manages to remove (teleport?) a number of car engines out of cars in a lot without scratching the paint one bit, and then later is more or less tearing the hell out of a bunch of other stuff). The deputy dad deals with the Air Force while the kids keep trying to film their movie and solve the Sooby Doo like mystery. Assorted movie genre havoc ensues. The Air Force is entirely staffed by complete a-holes (and somehow has tanks too). The alien is bad but somehow good. There is a really, really dumb battle involving tanks and machine guns somehow out of control (or perhaps controlled by the alien) and shooting randomly (did I mention the sprinkling of Maximum Overdrive that they threw into this?). By the way, I know this is petty and going to make me look like a total tread head geek, but the M60 tank (the tank used by the US military in 1979 and featured several times in this movie) required a manual loader to reload the main gun, so unless the loader was mind controlled along with the tank itself there is no way the gun could fire more than once. Furthermore, standard procedure was to leave the main gun unloaded until it was known they needed it. Lazy writers really bug me, but I guess we had to get that “battle” scene inserted somehow.
I don’t want to go on any more, as I have found any detailed description of a typical film tends to make it look even stupider than it actually is (at least when I do it). Let’s get into the stars and black holes, shall we?
First the stars. While extremely derivative of the movies I listed, at least it was a decent tribute to all of them. One star. One thing I can say about J.J. Abrams is he really knows how to cast well. One star. The other thing I can saw about him is he manages to get really good acting performances out of the people he casts (suck it, Lucas). Kids have to be the worst actors to work with but somehow he got stellar performances out of all of them. Kudos. Three stars. The story, while awkward and prone to a couple major holes, was reasonably good and made sense most of the time. One star. The pacing was really good. One star. As dumb as the train crash was, the pyrotechnics involved were spectacular. One star. They managed to avoid having a bunch of kids somehow beating the hell out of a bunch of grown military men, which I was kind of expecting. One star for not grinding my gears. What little we could see of the creature was pretty good, and the CGI was decent. One star. The aliens spaceship was apparently made of space Legos. One star. Overall the movie going experience was decent. One star. Total: twelve stars.
Now the black holes. The movie lacked a definitive tone. Two black holes. The stupidest and most unnecessary battle scene in cinema history (seriously, I think the pyrotechnics guy was holding the directors kids hostage at a couple points). One black hole. The movie was set in the 70’s and was almost the 80’s, two decades I hate with the burning passion of 10,000 suns. One black hole (this is a personal one, so if you are OK with bad hair, clothes, and music disregard it). The Air Force colonel’s complete disregard for any kind of consequences of his or his men’s actions (setting the countryside on fire, more or less destroying a small American town, holding civilians without regard for any of their rights, etc.). One black hole. A massive vagueness of the aliens motivations, actions, or powers (if he could take control of a ton of tanks and jeeps in the middle of a town, why didn’t he use that power to escape when he was held by the military or being transported on a train?) One black hole. J.J. Abrams or any of his supporting writers apparently don’t really understand how magnetism works. One black hole. Total: seven black holes.
I also have a few points in my new “irksome but not black hole worthy” category. First of all, this film was rated PG-13, but it seems like it was designed to appeal more to the 10 year old crowd. Unfortunately I think a younger kid would feel the lack of tone a lot more than an adult, as it shifts gear from “cute kids doing kid stuff” to “pee pee pants scary” rapidly and without warning. Bad planning on the directors part, I think. Also, I found the dead mother subplot with the girl’s father involved really unnecessary. It didn’t detract from the story but felt crowbarred in to add a few dramatic scenes. They also did the thing where you never really got a good look at the creature. It was annoying through the first 2/3rds of the film and then, when it is finally revealed (looking remarkable H.R.Giger-ish), still doesn’t show us most of what he really looks like. It’s like they were paying for the CGI by the pixel. Finally, the actual ending was pretty predictable and remarkably sappy. Again, not really hurting the movie, but if J.J. had wanted a movie to actually stand next to E.T. I think he could have put a little more effort into it.
So a total of five. It would have been funny if I could arrange this to end up with eight, but I have too much integrity for that (LOL). I guess I will call this Super 5. I think it definitely worth seeing in a theater, and it is entertaining enough to hold your interest. However, it is a lot like watching an Ramones tribute band. You will enjoy the performance, but at the end of the show more or less forget about it and move on with your life, content in the knowledge that the original Ramones will never be topped. See it once, but pass on the DVD is my advice. By the way, it will be well worth your time to stay for the credits.
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