Flash forward 28 years and 364 days later, and we now have the opening of Super 8, a homage to E.T., among other early Spielberg films, from writer/director J.J. Abrams, who not only pays tribute to the filmmaker, but has Spielberg along as his macher co-producer.
No one who comes to my 16-screen megaplex tonight will have to wait on line to get in (we have reserved seating and online ticketing), and today's theaters are filled with more distractions than just talking, but I will be surprised if we have trouble with people texting in Super 8. The secret that nobody tells you about texting during the movies: people tend to not do it when what's up on the big screen is more compelling than what's on their small screens. If you're watching Super 8, you're really going to be watching it.
(There are, of course, exceptions -- from "exceptional" individuals, aka self-involved assholes, who don't believe that courtesy of others is something that's required of them as adults. I applaud the Alamo Drafthouse for making an example out of one of them -- an example that's been viewed 1.4 million times since it was posted this week.)
Super 8 is the first hat-trick for Abrams, as he's written, produced and directed the film. It's also the first non-franchise film he's directed -- his other two directorial credits were the third installment of the Mission: Impossible series and the successful 2009 reboot of the evergreen Star Trek franchise. Super 8 is an original story, set in a small Ohio town in 1979, that evokes the era of the time by using some of the filmmaking techniques prevalent back then, which apparently include excessive lens flares and not showing the monster until the third act. (I grew weary of the former, but applaud the latter.)
Super 8, for those too young to know, was an improved 8mm film stock introduced by Kodak in 1965, and was what amateur filmmakers could afford to use to make films, back in the day when you couldn't use a phone for that stuff because it was still back at home, affixed to a wall. (We used Super 8 stock to make short films in my Visual Arts class in junior high school, a class taught by the prolifically bearded Mr. Greene, who always managed to be playing Physical Graffiti on the classroom's record player. For years I thought of "Kashmir" as "Mr. Greene's Theme," but I digress.)
Young Joe Lamb (a wonderful neophyte named Joel Courtney) lives with the sorrow of his mother's recent factory-accident death and with his depressed father, Jackson, who's Lillian's deputy sheriff (Kyle Chandler). Joe's friends have all agreed to kick off their summer vacation by helping their friend Charles, a pudgy kid from a big family, make a Super 8 zombie movie. To lend it more verisimilitude, they're going to start at midnight, when both Joe's and Charles' ideal 14-year-old woman, Alice (Elle Fanning), will pick up the film crew in a car she's "borrowed" from her dad, a ne'er-do-well townie named Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard).
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| Jackson, Joe, Alice and Louis, awestruck by something *secret* |
Joining Charles, Joe and Alice, the leading lady, are Cary, the pyro kid we all knew growing up, Martin aka Smartin, the lead actor playing a detective on the zombie beat, and assistant Preston. After a rehearsal of a scene at Lillian's tiny railroad depot, the kids see an actual train approaching in the dark night, and Charles' battle cry of "production values!" hurries them into setting up to shoot the scene so that the train can be barreling through the station in the background (Charles directs his actors to talk extra loud).
In the distance, Joe notices a pickup truck racing towards the tracks, then deliberately stopping on them, directly in the path of the oncoming train. A frightening, but cinematically excellent, derailment follows, the children fleeing for their lives, and while the camera is knocked over, the film keeps running. Regrouping afterwards to assess the damage, they are shocked to discover that the truck was driven by their science teacher, Dr. Woodward (played by Glynn Turman, Mayor Royce on The Wire), who terrifies them both by virtue of still being freakily alive, and by brandishing a gun and telling them that they and their parents will come to harm if they tell anyone what they saw. Shaken by a second confrontation with death on the same night, the crew agrees and narrowly escapes the arrival of military personnel flooding into the crash scene.
Deputy Sheriff Lamb rightfully suspects that there are an awful lot of military troops on hand for an ordinary train derrailment, and has his requests for manifest info denied. Joe tells the rest of the kids that this was an Air Force train, something he recognizes from his experiences as a model-builder. Seemingly random stuff starts disappearing from the town: people, power cables, microwave ovens, speak-and-spell toys, car engines, all the town's dogs (ok, one of those is from a different movie). I don't want to talk about the rest of the plot, except to say that there are some good, old-fashioned, goosebumpy jolts along the way and a passing acquaintance with the inchoate longings of youth on the brink of adolescence.
A lot of emphasis is being placed on how Super 8 is derivative of Speilberg's work, as a director, writer or producer, especially relating to the kids portrayed in The Goonies and E.T. I have to say, I'm not particularly disturbed by the obvious references. People used to criticize Brian DePalma for making three psychological thrillers between 1980-84 that were (and still are) extremely derivative of Hitchcock (Dressed to Kill, Blow Out -- which also evokes Antonioni's BlowUp and Coppola's The Conversation -- and Body Double), but he made an infamous remake of Scarface in those years as well. It's clear that Abrams is an otaku of this type of genre and, probably like many men his age, has an affinity for Spielberg's early work. If you're going to be derivative, why not at least borrow a vibe, or a trick or two, from a good director who was working during the time in which you film is set?
I don't think Abrams has enough films under his belt to have developed a style that is clearly his own, repetitive lens flares notwithstanding. Maybe he never will. Is this film as original, ambitious or visually thrilling as last summer's breakout film, Inception? No it is not. (But then I would quibble that Christopher Nolan is no Stanley Kubrick, either.) But with his last two films J.J. Abrams has delivered entertaining summer movies that are a popcorn-gobbling pleasure to watch. In this season of over-marketed/3D/spandex-clad junk, that's an accomplishment.
*Awesomely inappropriate double feature: Super 8 paired with 8MM (which stars Do You Want Butter on That? fave, Nic Cage). I dare you, New Beverly Cinema. I double-dare you.
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