Too much JJ, not enough Steven

Rating: 7/10 (16 June 2011)

Super 8 is partly about growing up and partly about aliens. J.J. Abrams directed it, and Steven Spielberg produced. I expected a sentimental but exciting coming of age tale, derived somewhat from E.T. and from movies like Stand by Me. Then I remembered that J.J. Abrams was involved.
The year is 1979. A group of kids, making their own movie using a Super 8 camera, are present when a freight train crashes in their town. But the train's carrying some odd-behaving cargo, and soon the kids are swept up in an alphabet soup of conspiracy, mystery, death, unhealed emotional wounds, and love. You can see Spielberg's fingerprints on the sweet stuff, but the heavy lifting falls, unfortunately, to Abrams, who here gives us an unofficial follow-up to his last over-hyped ball of fire, Cloverfield.
You see, Super 8 is really two movies. One is sort of your standard something-is-amiss-in-a-small-town-and-the-military-is-hushing-it-up plot. The other is a more subtle, gentle look at growing and departing relationships, of loves past and present. And that's sort of where the problem lies for me; although the two genres can mesh well, here one part works very well and the other is a pile of predictability.
The protagonist is young Joe (Joel Courtney), best friends with Charles (Riley Griffiths). Joe's mom was killed in an accident at the local plant, an event that has had quite the effect on Joe and his relationship with his dad, the town's deputy. As you might guess, Joe's dad has grown distant with the loss of his wife, which he blames on the town drunk, leaving poor Joe sort of rudderless. That's one of the reasons he pals around with Charles and the rest of his friends, to escape.
The boys are making a movie with Charles as the director, and they ask one of their classmates, Alice (Elle Fanning) to play the female lead. Charles secretly likes Alice, but it becomes clear she has an eye for modest, unassuming Joe, who does makeup and lighting. At any rate, while they are filming near an old train station, a speeding train passes them by, then derails. After the kids emerge from the wreckage relatively unscathed, they recover their film.
Of course, the train wasn't carrying ordinary cargo, as the film soon proves. But what is it? This is where the influence of Cloverfield kicks in. Abrams tries hard not to show us the creature in its entirety until near the end of the movie, but that didn't make it any scarier. The shots of the alien were amateurish, sometimes ridiculously staged as if straight out of a particularly poor B movie from 1953. I know the innocence of youth was a recurring theme, but I expected to be jumping a lot more than I was. In fact, here's an example of just shoddy filmmaking: there would be this intense, suspense-inducing music playing while the camera focused on one character, then sudden silence. And then, wouldn't you know it, an attack out of nowhere. No sir, didn't see that coming! So the exciting action scenes lacked a lot, like panache, creativity, chills, and even logic. Here's another example. During the trainwreck scene, the kids flee as debris rains all around them. Not just pieces of wood but rather entire cars, huge chunks of metal, and so on. They're never hit. All this stuff flying around, and they may as well have been in the perpetual center of a giant tornado. Sure, you have to suspend your disbelief, but there were a few howler scenes in this movie that really sort of forced you to metaphorically unhinge your jaw in order to properly suspend said disbelief.
The real upside to the movie, though, is the group of kids: they're a terrific, convincing lot. Luckily, we don't get stereotypical kids, like The Fat One or The Brain or The Slob, etc. Each isn't terribly defined, but they're not meant to be, and they're still memorable in their own way. They exist less as window dressing and more as a running color commentary on their various relationships.
Fanning is terrific as Alice. I almost didn't recognize her; at this age, she looks like a young Martha Plimpton, and if Ms. Fanning ever reads this, I mean that as praise. In a few scenes, she's playing a girl playing an actress, and she nails it. I have to believe it's not easy pretending to be something you're not anyway, so pretending to pretend just doubles the difficulty.
Spielberg's touch is evident in the way the kids relate to each other and to adults; there are no cardboard caricatures, just honest characters. We see the wonderment and guileless glee that most of us had in grade school. We see kids being kids, in awe and curious but not terrified of the world around them.
Spielberg's contribution works; Abrams' doesn't. If you liked Cloverfield and its poorly edited action scenes, this will be your bag. The bad guys are obvious, the impetus for the creature's existence is clear, and it's all telegraphed well ahead of time. They must have spent a fortune in CGI, mucking up what might have been a tender growing-up story set against an alien-invasion backdrop.