by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Super
8, a major-studio
production released in 2011 by Paramount in association with Steven Spielberg’s
company, Amblin Entertainment, and writer-director J. J. Abrams’ company, Bad
Robot. It’s basically E.T. meets The Blair Witch Project; it’s set in 1979 (a bit late in the day for the Super-8 film format,
after which the movie is named; Charles found himself wondering whether anybody in today’s movie audience, especially the
teens at whom this film was clearly aimed since its main protagonists are
middle-school students, knows what Super-8 was, and in today’s age of cheap digital video
the idea that you would have to shoot something on film and then have to wait
three days for it to be developed — a jarring note comparable to that in
Patrick McMahon’s memoir Becoming Patrick in which he recalled that, as an adoptee who had
traced his birth family and was preparing for his first meeting with them in
1990, one thing he wanted to make sure of was that his cameras were properly
loaded with film) and the central characters are Charles Kaznyk (Riley
Griffiths), writer and director of an amateur movie about zombies called The
Case that he’s
shooting with a Super-8 camera (that appears to be equipped with synch-sound
capability, which would have put it at the very high end of amateur moviemaking equipment in
1979 — probably beyond the ability of working-class people in the steel town of
Lillian, Ohio, where the film takes place, to afford) and wants to finish in
time to enter it in an upcoming contest; Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), makeup man
and all-around assistant on his project; and Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning,
Dakota Fanning’s younger sister), the girl Joe invites to play a leading role
in the movie because he’s got the hots for her (as does Charles) and also
because she has a car — or at least access to one — which will make it easier
to get to location shoots.
At the beginning of the film Joe’s mother is killed
in an industrial accident at the Lillian steel plant (the town is fictional and
named after J. J. Abrams’ own mother) — a piece of information we get in a
grimly ironic scene in which a workman takes down the numbers “784” on a sign
representing the number of days the plant has gone without an accident, and
replaces them with “1.” Joe’s dad, Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler, top-billed), is
a deputy sheriff who suddenly finds himself in charge of the department when
his boss, Sheriff Pruitt (Brett Rice), suddenly disappears — and the double
whammy of having vastly increased work responsibilities and having lost his
wife leads Jackson to take it out on Joe, demanding that he go to a baseball
camp over summer instead of staying in town to help Charlie finish his film.
Jackson also has a visceral hatred for Alice’s scapegrace father, Louis Dainard
(Ron Eldard), and forbids Joe from seeing Alice — while Louis, equally
arbitrarily, forbids Alice from seeing Joe, though naturally the two get
together anyway (Joe even climbs up the side of her house and enters through
her window), adding Romeo and Juliet to the surprising number of stories Abrams has ripped off for this one.
The big turning point in the story comes when Charlie and crew ride off to a
train station to film a scene in which Alice, playing the wife of the local
sheriff, resists his efforts to send her away for her own safety while he stays
behind to confront the zombies that are menacing the town — and when a train
actually passes by, Charlie calls out, “Production values!,” and demands that
his cast and crew hustle themselves into place so he can grab his shot while
the train is going by, thereby adding a sense of authenticity to his film.
Only
the train ends up in a spectacular crash that turns out to have been caused by
Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), an elderly African-American who was a professor at
the middle school the characters attended, and though they drop the camera and
flee from the scene, eventually they get the film and turn it in for
developing, though in the three days they have to wait a lot of other things
happen. Cars fly through the air, things explode for seemingly no reason and a
lot of the townspeople disappear, among other things, and Jackson Lamb gets
himself arrested by military police after he’s asked to come in for an
interview with the colonel running the local military base — and eventually the
truth comes out: two decades before, an alien spacecraft crash-landed in
Lillian and its occupant merely wanted, like E.T., to go home — only the army
captured him and subjected him to so much testing and prodding that he
developed a bitter hatred towards humanity. Dr. Woodward was then a military
physician but was dishonorably discharged for “subversive activities” because
he wanted to befriend and help the alien rather than detain and experiment on
it; he got a job as a science teacher in the area (a bit of a plot hole since
it was virtually impossible in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s for anyone to
be hired for any public-sector
job with the stain of a dishonorable discharge from the military on their
record) and continued to try to contact the alien; in fact, that’s what he was
doing with his pickup parked across the train tracks the night that the train
came (and somehow Dr. Woodward, though badly scarred, survived a direct hit
from a train on his truck!).
Super 8 is a beautifully staged movie; like his mentor, Spielberg, J. J. Abrams
is a master of the grammar of filmmaking with a near-perfect instinct for
knowing when to hold the camera still and when to move it, when to cut and when
to let a scene keep running, and though cinematographer Larry Fong has a bad
case of past-is-brown syndrome, he and Abrams deserve credit for keeping the
monster mostly in shadow or as a black-on-black shape in the night sky and
deliberately toying with us so we don’t get a full-on view of what the creature looks
like. Abrams also gets good performances from his cast, both teens and adults —
Elle Fanning in particular shines, at least partly because in the script her
character is the only person on Charlie’s movie project who is actually able to
act (we hear her co-star deliver Charlie’s dialogue with all the woodenness of
a first-day drama student or a porn performer, while she performs the scene
with a rich and thrilling variety of intonations conveying real emotion) — and
one of the film’s most charming aspects is that The Case, the film-within-the-film Charlie was making
on super-8, gets shown during the closing credits side by side with at least
part of the credit roll.
There’s nothing really wrong with Super 8 except it’s the sort of film that borrows so
much from other films you get the feeling you’ve seen it before even if you
haven’t; it’s a film that impresses but rarely moves one emotionally, and for
all his command of the grammar of film Abrams seems interested only in the most
basic emotional conflicts. One gets the impression the reason this film is
centered around middle-school students is not only that middle- and high-school
students are its target audience but also so Abrams doesn’t have to deal at
length with the higher levels of emotional complexity he’d have to depict if
his central characters were adults. It’s also a film that’s somewhat confusing
in its relationship to the Zeitgeist: the use of an Army officer as the principal villain can be read as
Left-wing (you can’t trust the military) or as Right-wing (you can’t trust the
government); given how long it takes to prepare a film these days, the movie
world is always at least a tick or two behind the Zeitgeist and it’s rare that you get a pair of films
that so convincingly reflects a change in the temper of the country as the two Iron
Man movies did
(Tony Stark as Obama-esque liberal in the first Iron Man and as Ayn Rand-ish Libertarian capitalist
superhero in the second one), and overall it’s an impressive movie that
entertains the senses but doesn’t really (except for brief shards of emotion in
the Joe-Alice-Charlie love triangle, and the scene in which Joe and his father
reunite) touch the heart.
