Outstanding young actors carry affectionate tribute

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2012)

It's 1979, E.L.O. and The Knack are on the transistor radio and the Walkman, Three Mile Island is on the TV, but five young teenagers escape from school at the start of the summer vacation with nothing on their mind except finishing their zombie home movie, shot on a Super 8 movie camera. Well, not quite: one of them fancies the pretty blonde daughter of the local bad boy, and – having added the character of a wife for the zombie-hunting detective – asks one of the others to persuade her to join the crew.
They assemble at the local train station at midnight to shoot the tearful wife begging her detective husband not to leave her. A real-life train thunders its way toward the station, and the team, eager to embrace the concept of 'production values', spring into action for a take. But a truck suddenly appears on the track, driving straight for the train.
What follows sees the town experiencing mysterious vanishings of machines then people, the military taking a close interest in the train wreck and something very nasty in the woods, before an ending that well, more on that later.
Produced by Steve Spielberg but written and directed by JJ Abrams, Super 8 is essentially a tribute to that far-off golden summer, when Abrams would have been thirteen himself. It's a tribute, too, to the small-town American values that Spielberg, of course, championed, to old-school movie making before digital age, and to friendship, and love (old and new), loss and letting go.
Perhaps something more original could reasonably have been expected from Abrams, creator of Alias, Lost and Cloverfield; certainly much of the film's plot will be familiar to fans of Poltergeist, The Goonies, Explorers and all of those kids' adventure films of the mid-eighties. There are many inconsistencies, and many very very lucky co-incidences that keep things moving along. The adult performances are only adequate and the ending will be not at all unfamiliar to anyone who saw a certain Big Film of 1982.
But it would be churlish to complain, and here's why.
There are some neat nods to film-making techniques and tropes, such as the scientists' documentary footage that screams of fifties B-movies. In an echo of both Cloverfield and Spielberg's War of the Worlds, there are some inevitable 9/11 references and there is some blood and guts. Just as Spielberg portrayed this milieu and these emotions straight and without cynicism, so to does Abrams; there is nothing ironic or spiteful about the relationships depicted and the teenagers are each carefully drawn. Importantly, though, and to recognise that things do change in a generation, these teenagers are smart, snappy and modern, without being unpleasant or super-saccharine.
Critically, the acting of every one of the six friends is, quite simply, superb. Joel Courtney is the quiet Joe, grieving for his mother but too confined by his father's reaction to the loss; Riley Griffiths is ballsy Charles, putative film mogul whose love for the girl nearly spoils things; Gabriel Basso is Martin, whose reactions as events spiral into an abyss shows real, genuine fear and pain; Ryan Lee is talkative firestarter Cary; and Zach Mills is world-weary Preston, with whom things are always safe. Improvisation shows in some of the sequences, and everyone gets their moment.
It's Elle Fanning, however, as that Girl – Alice – who really shines.
She delivers an exceptional performance throughout the film, but in two scenes in particular is absolutely heartbreaking. Both are enhanced by the sensitivity and skills of Abrams' direction. Early on, when the friends rehearse the film-within-the-film's station farewell scene, Abrams conjures a magical moment of young love emergent as, at the end of the take, all five of the boys are surprised to find lumps in their throats and the need for excuses to look away, the better to wipe their eyes. In contrast, when Alice later confesses her personal link to Joe's mother's death, it is made all the more powerful by the simplicity of its staging, Alice facing only the flickering screen showing Joe's father's home movies whilst Joe sits silently a little apart from her. I challenge anyone not to shed a tear at either scene, played to the hilt by an actress who was just twelve when the film was made.
As if that wasn't enough to recommend it, don't miss the end credits. You don't get any outtakes or sneak peaks or dance numbers; but what you do get is The Case, the complete film-within-the-film that the characters started making at the beginning, with all the wise innocence you'd expect. It's wonderful.
For all its flaws, this film's heart is absolutely in the right place, and if the direction and writing are a little lacking from their incendiary best at times, I think we can allow that.