Salivating over Stevie

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2012)

J. J. Abrams directs "Super 8", a love-letter to all things Steven Spielberg. Packed to the brim with allusions to Spielberg's films and personal life, the film revolves around a kid called Joe whose attempts to film a low budget movie are thwarted when a military train derails and releases a marauding alien into his sleepy, Ohio town.
The film plays like a Spielberg show-reel. Its plot, iconography and setting recall "Close Encounters" and "ET", several of its action sequences recall "War of the Worlds" and Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" movies, its quiet suburbias and rural landscapes recall everything from "Poltergeist" to "Encounters" and its gang of little rascals allude to both Spielberg's youth as a kid-director and the junior adventurers of "Goonies" and "ET". Then there's the film's giant train-crash set piece, a nod to Spielberg's love for the train wreck in 1952's "The Greatest Show on Earth", a set piece which he'd himself recreate as a kid in his very first amateur movie.
While Abrams also mimics Spielberg's cinematography, camera work and orchestrals, what links his film strongest to Spielberg's filmography is its central plot. Here, Joe's mother's death (and his distance from his father) echoes the real-life divorce of Spielberg's parents, a psychic scar which casts ripples on virtually all of Spielberg's pictures, with their absent fathers, separation anxieties and aching longings for daddies to "phone home" and mommies to "be good". "Phoning home" is also what Abram's alien hopes to do, the creature's plight echoing young Joe's, both alien monster and Ohio boy yearning to bury past scars, "let go" and "grow up". The film's only moment which works occurs during its climax, in which little Joe lets go of a locket which contains a photograph of his mom. The metaphor is heavy-handed – he LITERALLY LETS HER GO – but the sweep of the scene works very well.
What doesn't work is the rest of the film. Abrams can't frame a scene, move a camera, has no gift for action sequences, his script is obvious, his alien looks silly, his CGI is terrible, his kids swear too much, his plot is derivative, he overloads on Spielbergian camera work, his script is unsurprising and the film as a whole feels like a billion dollar fanboy movie. What's worse, the whole film is about moving forward and letting go of the past, and yet is supremely backward-looking, like a nostalgic necrophiliac preoccupied with unearthing and licking Spielberg's corpses.
Interestingly, the film is set in 1979, literally between Spielberg's "Encounters" and "ET". Those two films were themselves infused with a nostalgia for 1950s scifi B movies ("Invaders From Mars", "The Day The Earth Stood Still", "It Came From Outter Space", "War of the Worlds", "Them", "The Thing", "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" "Earth vs the Flying Saucers"), with their alien invasions, military jeeps, suburban/rural paranoia and little kid heroes. Spielberg's films were themselves packed with moments cribbed from these classics ("Jaws" literally uses the same score and scenes from "Creature from the Black Lagoon"), but because only he and Lucas were repackaging these films in his era, they felt fresh. Today almost all Blockbusters borrow from the Spielberg model (ie are B movies or exploitation films with mega A movie budgets), so what's the point making a "Super 8"?
6/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Bowfinger" and "Signs".