For months I had looked forward to JJ Abrams (LOST, ALIAS, the latest STAR TREK film) secrecy-shrouded feature SUPER 8, his homage to his once-hero and now-mentor Steven Spielberg and his awesome grab-bag of iconic ‘family-adventure films.’ Some Spielberg directed (E.T., RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) and some he just produced (GREMLIN, THE GOONIES), but his trademark stamp is impossible to ignore. Usually it takes kids and sends them on big adventures, pits them against big enemies, stacks against them what seem impossible odds and, experiencing these adventures and enemies and odds alongside them, we remember what it feels like to believe in magic.
SUPER 8 is also a lot like CLOVERFIELD, the monster-attacks-city movie from a few years ago that JJ Abrams produced and I loved as an allegory to 9/11 anxiety that there is nothing scarier than something loud and destructive slamming against buildings in New York. In SUPER 8 the fear is decidedly more post-9/11: there’s a monster out there that the government knew about but had covered up. It’s Patriot Act horror: what happens when the lies we aren’t told “in order to protect us” get out? What will we do if we aren’t prepared with the truth?
Unlike the claustrophobia of CLOVERFIELD (which forced us to recognize the “big city” was just a series of small spaces in which we could get trapped) SUPER 8 sets are sprawling, airy, idyllic expanses. The monster destroys plenty because he has plenty of room to destroy – but it’s a different kind of threat than that of his counterpart loose in the narrow, skyscrapered lanes of NYC. Somehow, because it has more room to run amuck, the creature feels more like an angry puppy than some unholy beast from beyond. It isn’t as real of a threat; the materials it demolishes aren’t hard steel and concrete but trees and houses, like a child destroying a Lego set after having too many grape Kool-Aid Kool Bursts. In fact, while CLOVERFIELD felt like it had a setting (however glossy or embellished), SUPER 8 feels more like it’s simply on a set – production values may be high (the call for “production values” is the mantra of the child-director making the zombie movie in the film) but this isn’t quite cinema verite.
And that’s the general vibe of SUPER 8 and one that works for it fairly successfully. It is also in line with J.J. Abrams postmodern tendencies to care more about storytelling than (and this is certainly the case here) the story. SUPER 8 is a monster movie about kids making a monster movie, and so throughout it all are touches of the wide-eyed DIY qualities that any kid fucking around with his friends and a camcorder know so very well. I look back on my own experiences being a film geek alongside childhood friends with nostalgia and, yes, some embarrassment (side note: I’m still upset I was never part of Josh’s original home video ATTACK OF THE AMISH, which somehow, despite my having nothing to do with it, stands like an obelisk in my memory: “when you’re buttons are all gone, and your VCR ain’t there, and you can’t find your blow-dryer so you can’t dry your hair…Attack of the Amish!”). SUPER 8 aspires to and tributes a prepubescent feeling of almost pre-embarrassment: when everything was possible, nothing is shameful; when the world was full of stories and ambitions and nights to almost-
kiss the girl of your dreams. This is surely Spielberg’s modus operandi and maybe such puerile goodwill has no place in the cynical world of government-sanctioned lies and outsized threats from outer space….but for a moment, before the train crashes, before shit hits the fan, when the kids are filming and the night is warm and Elle Fannings’ sort of outrageously good performance hits just right, there is a bit of magic. It is ephemeral and slippery, and Abrams loses it surely, but it was there. You know it when you feel it.I wish there were more attention paid to SUPER 8 clever Brechtian alienation and less to its undeniable faults. When the child director rewrites scenes to illicit an emotional response from the audience in order to “to make them care” it’s more than a tongue-in-cheek Ha-Ha aimed at the “real” audience; whether or not you know what your laughing at it’s actually the postmodern attribution of “standards” to a genre. Just as SCREAM taught us a lesson we didn’t-know-we-already-knew (never say: ‘I’ll be right back…”), so does SUPER 8 concern itself with concepts one Russian-Stacking-Doll further out from what’s physically going on on screen. But maybe SUPER 8's problem is that of the SCREAM sequels (2 and 3 anyway…I can’t bring myself to see 4): it’s a clever way to speak but there just may not be that much to say. Abrams has almost nothing to add to Spielberg’s family-friendly wonderment/awe/catharsis formula, so the best he can do is try to replicate it, and quite frankly, he can’t. He did his homework on Spielberg, fine, but he didn't CREATE anything that's his own. It's a mathematical problem that doesn't seem to occur to Abrams: no matter how perfectly you solve an equation, it isn't the same as designing a theorem. It isn't as elegant.
Further, in caring more about storytelling than story, Abrams overestimates his storytelling, because the story blows. Full of holes and inconsistencies, falling on trope and convention in an almost lazy way, populated by adult characters whose hokey motivations are straight from 1993, what actually happens in SUPER 8 doesn’t matter at all. We know where this train is heading and we know that, even if it is detailed along the w
ay, it’ll get there somehow. The children are the bright spot here (‘manipulative!’ cry haters) and a reason to see the film; ironic since it’s famously-coy marketing campaign teased the monster itself as the carrot on the stick. The monster, sadly, disappoints—sort of Clifford the Big Red Dog meets the CLOVERFIELD Monster, with of course the motivations (and table manners) of E.T. Its design is far too similar to the CLOVERFIELD monster—which is inexcusable really because the thing could have looks like ANYTHING to tell the story Abrams was telling. It’s nothing but a creative failure, any way you splice it.I don’t begrudge Abrams the intellectual preoccupation with Spielbergian convention, hell anything that successful and populist should be carefully considered, but SUPER 8 would have been better if Abrams had the creativity or gumption to give us some major BREAK from this convention, not only to surprise and entertain us but also to further educate about what it means to be a Spielberg movie in the first place. Instead of something original, we get an ending right out of E.T., made even further flaccid of course because we’ve seen it so many times since. The misunderstood alien goes home, the kid’s are vindicated as more than mischief-makers, life returns to normal. SUPER 8 fails to distinguish itself in the end, a common failing for so many action movies I see, but here it’s somehow even more toxic to the overall film: what’s the POINT of seeing SUPER 8 when E.T. in streaming on Hulu? What’s the POINT of caring when it all ends the same way?
And so, yes, not exactly the ground breaking film I was hoping for nor the latest monster to haunt my geeky monster-movie dreams. Still, I defend SUPER 8 as a well-made film. And it’s innocuous, hardly a compliment usually but here it almost (almost!) is. SUPER 8 trades in its innocuousness, its ability to neuter the monster movie and make it a family film – an idea that may be clever, that may be postmodern, that may operate successful – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.
The cross-branding writes itself. Till next time, you monsters.
