DVD OF THE WEEK: Super 8
by Vadim Rizov 
J.J. Abrams prefers remodeling franchise fixer-uppers to building his own material. In his directorial feature debut, Abrams took advantage of the malleable
Mission: Impossible franchise's friendliness towards idiosyncratic directorial stylings. Where
Brian De Palma showed off ornate set pieces and
John Woo delivered an enjoyably overblown melodrama awkwardly broken up with sporadic action, Abrams'
Mission: Impossible III is start-to-finish tense, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as the series' first truly frightening villain and Tom Cruise plausibly frazzled rather than smugly in-control. Next Abrams resuscitated
Star Trek, celebrating the source material while mildly mocking the creakier elements: crew member Chekov's absurd Russian accent (an anachronistic holdover from Gene Roddenberry's wish for a post-Cold War United Nations in space) became a running gag about the crew's consistent inability to understand what he's saying. Real emotion came from
Leonard Nimoy's cameo as Spock, tapping into viewer awareness of watching someone embody his trademark of the last 40-plus years for almost certainly the last time, a heartfelt baton-passing in the middle of what could've been merely a cynical cash grab.
The source material for
Super 8 (out on DVD this week, as well as
Blu-ray) is producer
Steven Spielberg's collected filmography as director and brand name, signaled by the opening Amblin Entertainment's
E.T.-on-his-bike logo?once an annual presence branding everything from
Back to the Future to
Casper with Spielberg's seal of family-friendly approval, but only seen twice on-screen in the last five years.
Super 8's 1979 setting strands it between 1977's
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (swiping the lightshow UFO ending and alien-caused electrical blackouts) and 1982's aforementioned
E.T. (echoed in its suburban kids freely roaming on bikes).
Amblin's
The Goonies is echoed in a less shrill cluster of young boys. De facto ringleader Joe Lamb's (Joel Courtney) mother has just died in a factory accident, a dark twist on Spielberg's ever-absent dads. Portly Charles Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths) is the self-proclaimed budding director of the local nerd pack, but Joe gets to coach classmate/leading lady Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) on-set, instructing her on how to make a zombie face and suggests emotions to draw upon for her would-be-showstopping monologue of stilted noir clich�s. Fanning's sudden transition from sullen teen to freaky flesh-muncher is awesomely unexpected, and she nails the speech, pumping dramatic heft in the low-grade production like a junior-grade version of Naomi Watts' audition in
Mulholland Drive.
2005's post-9/11 destruction-fest
War of the Worlds enters as a darker reference point when an apocalyptic train wreck and attendant debris (flying through the air like firebombs) literally blow up the delicate late-night moment. Put up with
Super 8's mostly second-hand action for the recognizably gawky portrait of childhood, an inversion of most mediocre action movies in which half-hearted characterization is tolerated as a necessary evil before getting to the spectacle. The alien's inevitably a letdown: cost-conscious as he was while producing
Cloverfield, Abrams keeps the monster briefly glimpsed in tail-swipes and shadows for as long as possible. When finally given extended full body shots in the slobberingly disgusting/suspenseful climax, the extraterrestrial's still frugally only half-shown in the dark of a mine. Here, Joey?a hurt abandoned child?empathetically/telepathically bonds with an alien that just wants to rebuild its ship and travel back home. The fact that, though it's lonely and in pain like a child of divorce, it has also eaten multiple townspeople is written off as unavoidable dietary need and never mentioned again.
Joey grows from geek to man while saving his fictional Ohio town from a carnivorous alien?or, alternately, from the military men pursuing it. Suspicion of army forces torturing potentially innocent civilians and recklessly destroying small towns in reckless pursuit of an elusive, potentially misunderstood Other offers an allegorical talking point for modern liberals (the monster isn't particularly sympathetic, but addressed with compassionate pragmatism, he'll stop hunting people and go away; negotiation works!). Setting the film during a comparatively mild recession in a small factory town grafts nostalgia for a relatively benevolent, now-passed industrial era onto the Spielberg broken-family dynamics.
The end credits string together the kids' goofy, warmhearted production, shot by the cast in the increasingly rare title format. The overall movie's gloomy undercurrents and darker implications are perhaps underdeveloped, leaving no traumatic scar on the kids, whose resourcefulness and
Bad News Bears-worthy naturalism close out the film in one blissfully uninterrupted five-minute blast straight out of
Be Kind Rewind: Abrams always follows blockbuster convention, but once again he's sprinkled in small-scale human emotions that linger after the pastiches and plot holes fade.
Posted by ahillis at November 23, 2011 1:13 PM
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