Simply an AMAZING STORY!

Rating: 10/10 (9 June 2011)

Swift shot: If you see this one in theaters, count yourself enlightened, if you wait to rent or own Blu Ray, consider yourself miserable. Because, trust me, if you wait til you are home to see this for the first time, unless you are exceptionally wealthy and have a veritable theater sized screen at home – - – you are going to be kicking yourself forever! Occasionally, every few decades or so, a film comes along that just fires on all cylinders and resonates with something inside you that hasn't been active since you were a kid. Super 8 manages to do just that, stir up imaginations I once thought completely dormant – where the critical, cynical adult in me keeps the child bolted up in a dungeon called "the impossible". I want to thank EVERYONE who made this film a reality, and I wonder if Paramount knows just how fortunate they are to have some of the best film-makers to ever hold that title on their label? Set in 1979 in a steel town in Ohio, Super 8 essentially is a story about a group of friends, over the summer, dealing with a tragedy that one of them endures at the onset of the film. It has the feel of a Stand By Me script, though devoid of any narration or device that tells the story in the present. This film, again, is just an Amazing Story with a supernatural, monster-thriller, or sci-fi element tossed in to keep the characters constantly malleable and interesting.
With great tragedy comes the need for great distraction, and Writer/Director J. J. Abrams gets this, and displays this, quite efficiently. Rather than let their friend, Joe (Joel Courtney) dwell on his personal loss, his gang of misfits, led by Charles (Riley Griffiths) – who thinks he is the next Hitchcock or Romero – comes up with a perfect distraction . . . a zombie film. At first some of the others think it a bit tacky to involve a kid who just lost someone close to be shooting a zombie flick, but they figure it might help him take his mind off of the loss as well. Not to mention, the girl who everyone is afraid to talk to, Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) has agreed to be in the film as zombie hunting detective, Martin's (Gabriel Basso) wife.
It all starts off innocently enough, Alice steals her dad's car, without a license (rebels that they are) to drive them to the shoot, EXTERIOR: late at night, a train station, now closed. They run through lines, Charles delights in directing his friends, and he tries to get the most out of what he's working with. His friends are a great team, considering they are in middle-school, and they manage a level of professionalism that exceeds their years. Then, something happens, a crash, about an EIGHT on the butt-pucker scale (patent pending), which really sets the sci-fi or supernatural elements into locomotion.
What happens next is all too easy to spoil, suffice it to say, something is not quite right in the steel town of Lilian, Ohio circa 1979. The Air Force, helmed by Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich) is somehow involved, Joe's dad, Jackson, the deputy sheriff, played by the exceptionally talented TV-actor (Kyle Chandler) is suddenly put in charge and the misfits find themselves caught in the middle of everything but are still hell-bent on finishing their film to submit to the Cleveland Film Festival . . . ah great aspirations must start somewhere, but Cleveland? Comedy and tragedy is spliced into the story masterfully in short little bursts with character dialog, incredible action sequences and excellent acting. And, someone check me if I am wrong, but did they cryo freeze the blond-haired brat from the 70′s version of The Bad News Bears and place braces on him to hide his identity? Because, that kid Cary (Ryan Lee) in Super 8 is his clone! Super 8 is a high-tech drama with a childish heart that reminds you what it was like to build models, pine for the prettiest girl in school, and to never stop fighting for those you love. It is a film about loss, grief, struggling to cope and acceptance, all with a "twist" just to make things more interesting . . . or rather, AMAZING!