If reading the title of this movie makes you think first of a chain of reasonably priced motels then you might be a little too young to feel nostalgic when watching Super 8.
I’d read that the story involved a group of kids who accidentally and initially unknowingly capture footage of an alien while filming an amateur movie with their 1970s Super 8mm film camera. That, combined with the sort of ominous vibe given off by the movie’s poster, had me going in expecting to see some kind of supernatural thriller. Technically that aspect of the movie is there but Super 8 is really a human drama with some incidental alien action thrown in. On the surface the alien bit seems to be the main attraction but it really serves to enable the human plot to develop and progress. Steven Spielberg is the producer so I shouldn’t have been surprised to see shades of ET and The Goonies in Super 8. The kids ride around on the same kind of bikes that Elliot carried ET past the moon on. They talk over each other like a bunch of Goonies, worse actually. There is quite a bit of nostalgia in this movie for people around my age but just to be clear, although set in 1979, Super 8 was definitely and obviously made in 2011 for a much more desensitised and jaded generation. Although bits of it reminded me of ET and The Goonies, the material is much darker.
Soon after the movie started and most of the main characters had appeared I was pleasantly surprised to have recognized none of them. I find this is generally a good sign, it shows that the producers had enough faith in the story to not worry about having a couple of big stars to carry the film. (Actually I recognized two of the adults but not enough to know their names.) The story, although original, did remind me of some earlier Spielberg stuff as I’ve already mentioned. It started out well and even got better in the middle. The end was where it just kind of failed to come together completely for me. It felt like it had tried to recapture some of the early Spielberg magic but came up just short.
That said, I will definitely recommend this movie, at least when it comes out on DVD. This recommendation is mostly for the work done by the two lead kids. The boy, Joel Courtney, is very good. The girl, who looked vaguely familiar but who I really didn’t know, was brilliant. Turns out she is Elle Fanning, little sister to Dakota. She steals every scene she is in but there are two scenes in particular where she really shines brightly. I wonder if you’ll be able to tell which scenes I’m talking about, yeah I’m sure you will. I find I’m usually willing to cut significant slack to a mostly mundane movie if it contains even one or two moments of soul stirring, heart rending or even gut wrenching. Thankfully, despite its failings, Super 8 does have moments of clarity and brilliance (mostly due to one young actress). Without Elle Fanning Super 8 gets about a 6.5 from me. With her it gets an 8, or shall we say a Super 8.
