Cut to the chase: A coming-of-age tale echoing Spielberg’s classics, Super 8 folds an array of cinematic elements into an engaging, albeit uneven, summer blockbuster that hints at a greater potential than the final product can deliver. Sometimes, less is more.
Super 8 writer/director J.J. Abrams is not unlike a chef, slaving over the cinematic stovetop as he blends in his favorite ingredients: a heap of human drama, a dollop of CGI eye-candy, a splash of humor, and a pinch of thematic sleight-of-hand. His end results are often a hodgepodge of deliciously diverse elements, a marriage of contrasting yet charming flavors, bewildering but magnetic.
Throughout his career, Abrams has boldly ventured into various storytelling genres – whether writing, producing, or directing. In turn, his portfolio reads like a collection of pop culture’s greatest hits, ranging from Felicity and Lost to Mission: Impossible III and Star Trek. Yet for all his sci-fi wizardry and visual effect pizzazz, Abrams primarily knows how to tell simple tales that invariably center on people first and concepts second.
In Super 8, the human drama revolves around Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), a young boy struggling to connect to his recently widowed father, the Deputy Sheriff in town (Kyle Chandler). In an attempt to move on, Joe agrees to help his buddies finish their zombie flick while his relationship with the film’s female lead, Alice (Elle Fanning), slowly blossoms. But when the kids witness a colossal train crash while shooting, a monster is unleashed on the quaint Ohio town that will inevitably change everyone’s lives forever.
The concept at work here is relatively simple: a young boy finds himself thrown into a fantastical situation. In turn, the boy’s struggles in his newfound situation will invariably teach him maturity, growth, and resolution. In this sense, Super 8’s core is solidly cemented by its young cast. In fact, the coming-of-age tale is the strongest element at play in this film. Amidst its larger-than-life monster movie concept, Super 8 stays relatively grounded, relying on its stellar human drama to keep the film from devolving into a rather recycled and underwhelming monster movie premise. Indeed, scenes between the kids easily outshine any sequence involving exploding trains, military takeovers, or rampaging monsters. In particular, Elle Fanning displays an impressive breadth to her character, striking shades of fear, anger, guilt, even zombie-acting. And newcomer Joel Courtney delivers an entrancing portrait of a young boy letting go of his past and grasping onto the present; his performance is as poetic as it is engaging, a real gem among the chaos of CGI and mystery.
One can’t seem to watch Super 8 without comparing it to the Abrams-produced Cloverfield from 2008. Both films thrived on marketing hype hinging on secrecy and mystery. Both promised glimpses of something otherworldly without delving too deep into the scientific or technical expositions. But above all, both films centered on a group of young men and women thrust into fateful circumstances, searching for reconciliation with the loved ones in their lives. In this sense, Cloverfield functions far better than Super 8. In Cloverfield, the action and stakes were immediate. The tension mounted incrementally. The pace was furious but never rushed. The human drama was simple yet profound. In turn, the entire film felt organic and holistically individual.
In Super 8, the story harkens back to the nostalgia of E.T. or The Goonies - films that evoked a specific sentiment for an entire generation of youths. And yet, in this "updated" coming-of-age tale, I felt that Abrams couldn’t quite balance the story. Too often, subtle moments of longing or intrigue or tension were undercut by jokes, lens flares, or CGI. It almost seems like Abrams was trying too hard to hit all the right notes, appealing to every imaginable demographic, and cramming in every beat of humor, drama, and action he could muster. Maybe Abrams should’ve just done a period piece. Or a family drama. Or a monster flick. Individually, the storylines would have worked well in any film on their own accord. Yet once combined, Super 8 struggles under the overwhelming weight of its own elements to ironically, deliver an underwhelming final product.
The whole of this film is not greater than the sum of its parts. The tone shifts wildly; the emotional resonance is too often undermined by CGI; the monster is as ridiculous as it is forgettable; the climactic confrontation is completely jarring and borders on laughable. I can’t quite place it, but something just seems undercooked - and simultaneously overbaked - in this film. Maybe it’s because the marketing campaigns pulled a deviously smooth bait-and-switch. Maybe it’s because I have come to unfairly expect too much from Abrams. Or maybe it's because Chef Abrams just added a few too many ingredients to an already delicious dish, overcrowding its overall flavor to the point of overload.
