Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Joel Courtney’s Joe Lamb is a 14 year old trying to get past the accidental death of his mother in their small Ohio-ian, 1979-ian town, with his father, Kyle Chandler’s Deputy Jackson Lamb not being a great deal of help, emotionally speaking. Joe’s helping his best friend, Riley Griffiths’ Charles, film a, er, film for a local film festival, alongside his other friends including Elle Fanning’s Alice Dainard, whom Joe’s expressly forbidden from consorting with, his father blaming her father for aforementioned accident.
Such family drama mostly goes out the window when the kids, filming one night on a borrowed Super 8 camera, witness a catastrophic train crash caused by their biology teacher. Why would he do such a thing, and what’s the deal with these weird other-worldly metal cubes the train was carrying?
As you’ve perhaps figured out by context, the train was transporting a now on the loose alien life form, along with components of the ship it arrived in, and he’s trying to get home while the Air Force roll into town to recapture him, locking down the town under a veil of secrecy. Of course, it will take a bit of digging and discovery, and a whole lot of adventure, for the kids, and the Deputy, to figure all this out.
Now, to be clear, Super 8 is not without its flaws, and given that talking about them is sort of the point of this podcast, we’ll get into them, but for me at least, the one overarching thing I’d like to say about Super 8 is that it is a great deal of fun, a very good blockbuster-type film with a bunch of great character touches, particularly in the support, and perhaps it’s table stakes these days, but some really nice CG action setpieces.
However if you want to nit-pick it, you absolutely can, as you can with most of the softer science fiction out there. Hell, E.T. has levitation and mystical healing in it, so in that context powers of electro-magnetism aren’t all that far out there. A more interesting nit-pick is the tone of the alien encounters, which has to rather awkwardly turn on a dime from being one step away from the Xenomorphs of Aliens, an evil, It-esque spider that appears to be eating people, to a highly advanced empathetic alien by the end of it. I mean, it’s sort of explained away in the text of it, but that logic never really gets matched to the emotion of it.
What Abrams handles better, and is probably the genesis of the “new Spielberg” nonsense, was the emotions and relationships between the youngsters, which has deliberate echoes, some might say outright lifting, from not just E.T. but the likes of The Goonies, which has worked very well with a mostly, Fanning aside, untested cast. Again, not perfect – the kid obsessed with blowing stuff up’s character arc is that he likes to blow things up, which is a rather less parabolic arc that you might hope for but entirely adequate for a minor supporting character, and both he and the rest of the crew make for a fun Scooby gang.
Of course, calling Abrams the new Spielberg was always a bit silly when the old Spielberg is still around making (mostly) great films, but hindsight is 20-20 and we didn’t know what Star Wars flavoured horrors awaited us. On a track record of this, the first Star Trek reboot, and a perhaps selective reading of his other earlier writing/production credits I can see where the thinking was, and I perhaps wouldn’t entirely disagree with it. At any rate, Super 8 is a very entertaining film, and very much not The Rise of Skywalker. So that’s nice. I award it Super 8 out of Super 10.