Kinda Superb 8

    

     Nothing extraordinary has ever really happened in the sleepy small town of Lillian, Ohio.  It's summer, and Joe Lamb, like any other kid, is spending his time with his friends, particularly focusing on helping his buddy Charles make a zombie film for a local film festival.  Having lost his mother to a grisly factory accident four months earlier, Joe welcomes the relaxation of summer break. His father, a police deputy, is otherwise determined to see Joe spend his summer at a baseball or football camp, away from his odd, filmmaker friends and the loneliness of home.  Joe has other plans - to stay in Lillian, help Charles with his film, and woo the heart of Alice Dainard, the lead actress in Charles' film.  The crew decides to shoot one pivotal scene out by some abandoned railroad tracks in the middle of the night.  After sneaking out, the kids head for the railroad tracks, their microphones, costumes, and trusty Super8 camera in hand.  
     Nothing extraordinary ever really happened in the sleepy small town of Lillian, Ohio.  A train crash on the tracks that night changes all that. 
     And not just any train crash - a train carrying suspicious, live, foreign cargo. The kids' near escape from the disaster they witnessed, a subsequent hush-hush Army take-over of the town, and the strange paranormal phenomenon that slowly builds the anxiety of every resident is the fabric of the new film from Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams, Super 8.  Super 8 is exhilarating, funny, heart-breaking at times, and at other times, scary.  If you take the film at face value, it seems to be the greatest film to come out in recent summers.  However, there are some deep flaws, including plot holes as big as the theater screens the masses are rushing to see this film on, and in the end, they drag the film down. Were it not for a great cast, stimulating special effects, excellent acting and witty writing, it would have been a disappointing disaster.     

     I want to start off first by saying what I liked about this movie, because there are definitely things I loved about it.  First of all, the cast, especially the kids, are all fantastic.  I can't think of a film in recent memory (Mean Creek, maybe?) in which the kids carried the story so well.  For several of the youngsters, this was their first role, which is quite impressive in the case of Joel Courtney, who plays the lead of Joe Lamb, and Riley Griffiths, who plays Charles.  Their futures are bright because of this production.  But the kids couldn't have had such great chemistry without realistic banter, great dialogue, and yes, even a few cuss words in there.  This isn't the Disney channel, guys.  Come on, if my friends and I filmed a train operated by government officials carrying an enormous, pissed off alien,and then watched it crash into a million pieces, I would say "Holy shit!!" a lot too.  Abrams did not shy away from this, and every demographic of his audience should love him for it.
     A lot of reviews I read claimed that this film was basically a rip off of The Goonies and E.T.   I tend to think it's not much of a rip off, just both of them fused together.  There were some cliches and archetypes within the group of kids - a pyromaniac who loves firecrackers, a chunkier kid, a nerd, a stoner, and a sensitive leader-type boy in love with a pretty girl.  But there were twists on the kids' characters that kept them interesting.  The "fat kid" of the group was not a bumbling, clumsy idiot, such as Chunk in The Goonies or Vern in Stand by Me.  He was intelligent, driven, creative, even bossy at times.  This breaks the "rip off" argument in two.

     That's as good a segue as any into what parts made me not like this movie, and ultimately why I thought the ending fell a little flat at best, and was anti-climatic at worst.  First of all, the alien looks and sounds almost exactly like the alien/monster from Abrams' previous POV movie Cloverfield.  No joke.  I actually thought JJ Abrams did it on purpose at first.  Maybe his creation from Cloverfield accidentally stumbled upon some inter-dimensional time and space supernova portal and fell into the storyline of Super 8.  Or Abrams is just lazy.  The screeches, growls, and screams of the alien were the biggest disappointment to me, because, like in Cloverfield, the sound becomes paramount when the filmmakers do not let the audience see what the creature looks like for most of the movie.  Therefore, the audience must depend on what they hear, not on what they see.  It's a shame that what they're hearing gives them deja vu.

      I also didn't like how half-way through the movie, Alice, gets kidnapped by the alien, and surprise surprise, the boys have to rush back into the danger zone to save her.  Don't act like I spoiled anything for you, you knew it was coming.  That's how cliche it is.  It was ultimately unnecessary, because the kids have very little interaction with the alien, save for a few minutes at the end.  They learn that the alien, who has killed a lot of people while running amuck in the town, and ruined countless property, is no more than a poor tortured creature held hostage by a dick head general, and all it wants to do is build its ship and return home.  Many questions about the alien remain unanswered, such as why he took some people hostage, but let others die.  
     In the end, I thought it ultimately fell apart a little bit.  I didn't feel as sympathetic for the alien entity as I wanted to, as much of its back story was rushed or just left unexplained, as were other scenes.  The scene between Joe's father and Alice's father, who was inadvertantly responsible for Joe's mother's death, was done in about a minute, and before you know it, the movie is over, and it isn't until the ride home from the theater that you begin to think about all the things that were missing - a totally coherent plot, and a better emotional investment in the main protagonists.  
     It's a shame that several factors were too poorly executed to make it as great as it could have been.  But the parts that were executed properly saved it in the long run.  And with a movie like Super 8 that has an ever so slight reminiscent atmosphere of Spielberg's old adventure films, critics and general audiences will continue to swarm to the screens to see it. My advice?  Go spend the money and see it at the theaters, as there's a train crash that rivals The Fugitive, and it is entertaining if nothing else.

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