True to the requirements of its plot above all else

Rating: 7/10 (8 June 2011)

Super 8 is a film that I wanted to like, whose characters I wished I cared about, but whose thorough preposterousness (the fault of persistent lapses in logic stemming from graceless, hurried set-up) crippled any possibility for real, enthusiastic engagement. It requires incredible suspension of disbelief in terms of both its basic plot/story structure, and – more damagingly – its young characters' relationships.
Emotionally, the film hinges on Joel's attachment to his mother, who recently passed away. Without this grief, there effectively is no story, no emotional conflict. And yet, the emotional and familiar trauma is established so quickly and so bluntly, the death is wholly instrumentalized – bypassing any kind of emotional affection it might have elicited, and emerging simply, and transparently, as a plot requirement. So much of the first hour of the film feels this way: from Alice's introduction, Joel's reaction to finding out that she's joining the cast, to they way the characters are introduced (via a few shorthand traits), and their faux-slice-of-life style of interacting with one another. Abrams has a way of both writing and directing 'on the nose' – telling and showing us (via dialog, visual cues, etc) exactly what we need to know when we need to know it, without art or subtlety. Instead of slowly discovering these characters, their relationships with one another, with their families, others, and the town itself, the exposition is dealt with rapid-fire, most often through shots and dialog that render the characters' feelings and ideas unmistakable. In this way, the machinations of the set-up are all-too-visible; rarely does a moment pass in the first half of the film in which some element is not made transparently and immediately visible as simply a plot or character 'requirement' that demanded setting up.
Alice, emerging as if from a social void, quickly becomes friends with Joel, Charles, and the gang after the night of the train crash; from here, Joel and Alice's relationship begins to take shape. Abrams deserves some credit. There are moments in the film of beauty and authenticity, however, Super 8's tendency toward rote sentimentalizing coupled with its dependence on unlikely timing and chance, often deadens their effect. Take a scene in Joel's bedroom: a few shining lines of emotionally authentic dialog between Alice and Joel is undermined by the fundamental unlikeliness of everything about the scene.
The film insists on getting to its proverbial feet too quickly. However, once it does begin to act on the plot and character situation it has so deliberately set-up, the machinations to some degree recede into the body of the film, and things run more smoothly – even if the film never relinquishes its fundamental reliance on the preposterous by way of the literal. The monster set-pieces are consistently entertaining – even when the relationships are at their most blunt – and the stakes amp up as things move along. The timing remains always just right, and everyone is always in the right place at the right time.
Visually, the film operates at, really, only two levels, vacillating between incredibly shallow DOF close and medium close shots of characters and objects, and CGI wide shots (of the town, the train, a bus in the woods, etc). Visually, the film is at its most interesting in those rare moments when it takes a step back, brings everything into focus, and shows us the characters in relation to the town around them. But, due to the paucity of such shots, there's never any real sense of space (or place), which greatly inhibits the ability of the film to sustain atmosphere (for, in an adventure scenario, the ambiance of spaces is critical). However, for the characters to plausibly move from location to location as they do, seemingly able to get from any one point in the town to any other in a matter of minutes, the shallow focus c.u. is an all important tool.
The kids' reactions to the explosions, mayhem, and general disorder that so often surrounds them tends to be closer to that of spectators, awed but abstracted (like the cinema audience itself), than of real human beings in imminent peril. As they run from tanks and explosions, we hear exclamations of "Whoa! That was crazy! Did you see that?" Even within the diegesis the kids seem positioned more as spectators than actors in the environment, emerging always unscathed with no more than the most superficial marks (with small scrapes, covered in a film of dirt).
This point, however, returns us to one of the film's central fissures. What is required by the plot takes precedence over what is plausible in the world the film has set up. In all, the film too often feels rote, flat. It hits the proper notes, but artlessly – without having effectively or convincingly established this world, these characters, and the situation they're in enough for the spectacle to amount to much. The confrontation with the monster/alien is ultimately trite and mostly unsatisfying: following in the footsteps of its cinematic forebears, the film humanizes the life-form, yet without expending much energy toward allowing us to understand its plight, preferring to take care of all that more efficiently, via some perfunctory audio-tape exposition from Dr. Woodward.
The film has its pleasures, and at least a handful of shining, beautiful little moments. We care enough about the characters, despite the too-often-thin material with which they're provided, to engage with the action/horror/danger set pieces; in general, the pure cinematic thrills of the monster-centered sequences are enough to carry us through the film (via the mostly expert sound design and effective staging). Ultimately, however, as an evocation of childhood adventure, friendship and first love, it doesn't hold up – committed only (and misguidedly) to getting the surface details/plot highlights right, putting to screen its abbreviated, summary version, but failing to either atmospherically or narratively convey the depth (emotionally or spatially) and textural richness a successful characterization would require.