Film Review | Super 8

Steven Spielberg has always been a master puppeteer. Not just of his actors, props and special effects (which, along with his long-time pal and sometime collaborator George Lucas, he is partly responsible for revolutionising). He is also an expert when it comes to tugging at the heartstrings of the audiences to produce an instant emotional effect, thanks to his deft handling of every aspect of Hollywood screen production.

This has been the secret of his success for quite a while, and on a personal note, it’s part of the reason why his presence – colossal now as it ever was – makes me slightly uneasy.

There is something slightly sinister about having such a talent at emotional manipulation… and I suppose we only have whatever gods we find handy to thank that Spielberg largely deals with heart warming tales of human endurance, and has not yet decided to take on political office.

Spielberg is merely a producer on Super 8, but his presence is felt in every single frame of J.J. Abrams’s homage to E.T. And just like his master before him, Abrams has shown himself to be both tapped in to the emotional zeitgeist of his audience and enterprising enough for it – he is, after all, the brain behind the sprawling television superhit Lost, and his masterful (and pop culture friendly) rehash of the Star Trek saga won me over despite its questionable glitz and MTV-ising of an illustriously lugubrious geek property.

Abrams’s sprightly tale of aliens and kids starts off with a funeral. Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), the Deputy Sherrif (Kyle Chandler)’s son, has just lost his mother to a mill factory accident. Despite being overcome by grief and gently nudged towards more ‘wholesome’ activities by a quietly suffering father, Joe insists on helping his friends out with an amateur zombie B-movie production their working on and for which the group’s self-appointed director, Charles (Riley Griffiths) has just scored their school beauty as a romantic lead.

But Alice (Elle Fanning – yep, relation), has domestic troubles of her own… some of which might have to do with the death of Joe’s mother.

All of which, of course, is buffeted away to irrelevance when the kids come into contact with a destructive alien force while shooting a key scene of their film.

And when the army gets involved well… you know the drill.  

While Spielberg is the main influence behind Super 8, Abrams sneaks in a cosmetic set piece that is entirely his own. When the alien centrepiece is finally revealed (and boy, are we teased about it), it bears closer resemblance to Abrams’s previous tale of alien invasion – the Blair-Witch-shaky-cam styled Cloverfield.

For that is Abrams’s Protean talent: he can weave from one genre into another like a snake while still delivering a sleek product. Sometimes though, it just feel all too sleek and with a story so emotionally suffused, these kinds of genre exercises tend to get a bit jarring.

But the kids are pretty good, and the buttons are pushed in all the right way. The 80s markers (Blondie and Walkmen, mainly) are cute, and the palpable love of ‘movie magic’ gets close to being enchanting.

It’s just a pity that it drags on for nearly two hours – by which time the spell would have faded. And never mind the fact that we’ve seen it all before.

But for a second there, I felt I was in a ‘safe pair of hands’, instead of being bombarded by effects shots and hammy lines – one after the other.

Perhaps this is what we’ve lost.