Super 8 movie review

I don’t know what was really going with Super 8 – it is good, but too much of a cocktail of cool ideas. It looks great, but there is just something weird about how the whole movie was executed. Why go through the trouble of having such a great a premise, but then have the movie just turn into a monster movie? I just don’t get it.

The movie begins with Joe and it reveals, cleverly with its opening image, that his mother died in a factory accident. Moreover, Joe and his father grow apart in the tragedy and Joe finds solace in his friends who all like to make fun little 8mm films.

The whole first half is essentially about the boys and their love of making silly, but nonetheless well crafted, 8mm movies. These sections of the movie were so well written and put together I was pretty sure I was watching a classic in its becoming. But then all of sudden all that cool shit was thrown out the window and it turned into scene after scene of a monster jumping out and killing somebody and the kids running through war zones.

I was annoyed because I was pretty sure no 8mm film or camera existed that could record sound unwild. However, my father, a former chemical engineer at Kodak, commented that he thinks such strips existed briefly.

Also, side bars about telepathic aliens and a government cover-up were thrown in and then it turned into feeling bad for the abused monster – all while the movie tried to find closure with a father and son relationship that never really made any sense.

Is the movie about the death of innocence and childish past times? My brother rightly pointed out that they couldn’t take the movie making storyline into the latter part of the movie because it wouldn’t make sense that the boys would be shooting a movie while the carnage was going on. This is very true, but my response to that is then don’t have the latter part just be them running through carnage. Or, don’t have the really fun premise to then scrap it half-way through for a monster movie.

People complained about the Spielbergian homages, but I couldn’t care less if the movie is transparent about its love for these moments. (Why shouldn’t it?) Have the children riding bikes while army officials chasing them – I don’t give a shit. What they shouldn’t do is shake our emotional cores with the joys of being innocent and obsessing over a hobby to just turn the movie into a noisy, but very entertaining, action film. Why couldn’t they combine the two?

The movie is after all called Super 8. What happened to the moviemaking premise?

One of the last scenes with them making a movie. *sigh*

Also annoying was the relationships between father and son. What a pointless abligatory subplot. The movie is supposed to be about the boys! It reminded me of episodes of Southpark that focus on ancillary characters. We show up for the boys, not the side characters or Randy Marsh (as awesome as they might be). Imagine if E.T., one of the better movies ever made, had foolishly cut-away scenes of the mother doing pointless things that didn’t effect the overall story. It would have pissed you off because the movie is about the kids, not the parents.

A key element of any good movie is the main characters have to effect the outcome of the movie. If they don’t, then they shouldn’t get their own sequences.

Super 8 knew this and made sure that the parents didn’t impact the movie too much, but continued to have them on screen. The problem: They don’t effect the outcome of the story —  at all. Fine by me, but then cut them out entirely. Having the two parents show up at the end and their relationships reconciled was idiotic, if not totally contrived.

What does work is the relationships between the boys. The main boy Joe (Joel Courtney)  is a little acting genius, which made me wonder aloud to my brother the tragedy that he wasn’t around for the Phantom Menace. Moreover, Joe’s friend Charles steals the show as the ambitious, Carl Denhamesque movie director who loves making movies at any cost.

Scene stealing.

Their friendship makes up the core of the movie’s earlier stages and makes the latter part of the film all the more disasterous when they abandon the relationship for action movie payoffs. Other members of the group are less fleshed-out, but nonetheless fun to watch. So all-in-all you have the “fire cracker” kid, the “fat” kid, “the nervous kid”, the “charming kid”, and the ” rebellious girl”. Not bad. But again, all this just to have them break up at the end. Stupid. They have the nervous kid get hurt, so the fat kid has to stay behind. Fucking jip.

Imagine if the Goonies ended with only a couple of the Goonies at the end. You’d be fucking pissed right? Or imagine if Stand by Me ended with just a one of the boys. You’d be pissed right? And don’t give me bullshit like, “Well it is a different movie.” Nope. The action is superbly shot, but the movie taps into our memories of other movies and then betrays the nostalgia by pursuing homages of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still. Whatever your opinion of the movie is, don’t be fooled by the magic of Abram’s visual talent and instead consider the tragedy of what he did with such good ideas.

-Collin