Induces awe as well as humbles the heart.

Rating: Null/10 (5 August 2011)

So I'm sitting in the theatre, about thirty minutes into J.J. Abrams latest sci-fi blockbuster when I suddenly think to myself; I haven't seen a movie quite like this in a while. In fact, it's a style which owes very much to the film-maker that Abrams too often gets himself compared to, and to whom produced his latest here; the somewhat misleadingly titled Super 8. Set in the eighties and very much influenced by eighties film-making such as The Goonies and E.T., Super 8 is like taking a day-trip back in time whilst carrying a camera phone to capture it all with a different voice. Filtered through the modern capabilities of Abrams, the movie is big, loud and certainly no stranger to broad strokes of action and suspense, but filtered through well- developed characters and drama, Super 8 feels (if you'll excuse the pun) down to Earth in ways that Spielberg made his name in doing; it's human fantasy, and rather than feeling like a cheap throwback to simpler times, allows itself enough room to breathe in the modern arena to feel both refreshing and vibrant on our big fancy digital, modern displays.
Without giving too much away (which is considerable when you take into account that the biggest plot point of the movie comes into focus only half-way in), Super 8 which is Abrams' first venture in writing a blockbuster entirely on his lonesome, is half monster and half family drama, coming of age, buddy movie. Opting to spend the majority of the feature's opening act on the latter rather than the former, one could easily be convinced that the monster might never rear its tentacles as the breadth and depth that Abrams spends developing and focusing on his characters is considerable. But the movie is far better off because of it, and in turn that latter focus on the monster works to a greater extent as a result. Indeed, parallelling what is perhaps his own experiences with making features and working in TV, the central group of friends here who are budding film-makers of their own, understand the basic principle of drama—to create people and relationships that the audience can latch onto and care about. Without that, well, it's just some guy in a costume dancing with some other guy.
Thankfully however, Abrams gets this and allows his audience not just the thrill of this spectacle of events that transpires on the screen, but the thrill of being along for the ride with the people whom this is happening to. Sure enough, the drama never reaches the point of anything morose or academy award winning, but it doesn't have to in order to get its point across. There's comedy, there's fear, there's love, loss and regret—all of which come across the vast boundaries of the screen without stumbling or being too involved in themselves to even bother. Instead Abrams delivers a story which induces awe as well as humbles the heart through both sufficient narrative and his usual near-flawless grasp of the beats of movie action. In scenes which are as loud as Michael Bay's typical output but with the crash bang wallop timed perfectly to the point where each one makes you flinch, the action in Super 8 is loud, abrasive and certainly doesn't hold any punches—except of course when it comes to revealing the monster.
It's perhaps the movie's only real flaw which resides within a form of movie-making that usually works for the better. Allowing the audience to fill in the gaps that he leaves out of his shots for the majority of the film, Abram implies more than he shows, and while this works for the earlier segments of the film it can at times come off as overly contrived to the point of tedium. When the curtain is lifted however, we kind of see why—the monster isn't what we're interested in so much as what he's doing, why he's doing it and how this affects our human characters. In the end we find that there are no obtuse "parts" or genres to the movie at all; that's it's not a monster movie insomuch as it's a story about being understood in a cruel environment which we can't always control. Set against the wistful imaginations and ambitions of a group of kids soon to enter the world of adulthood, this makes the perfect backdrop for such themes. It's the kind of thing Spielberg did so well when bicycles and the Walkman were all the rage, and you could argue hasn't been done with as such spirit since—Well, at least until now.