J.J. Abrams | 112 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA / English | 12 / PG-13
Before he started star warring and between bouts of star trekking, director J.J. Abrams teamed up with producer Steven Spielberg for this homage to the kind of movies Spielberg produced in the ’80s. Those films have endured down the decades; I’m not sure Super 8 endured as far as Abrams’ next lens flare showcase film. Which is a little bit of a shame because, by being Abrams’ most personal film, it may also be his best.
Set in the summer of 1979, the film follows a group of teenage boys making a zombie film, in particular Joe (Joel Courtney), whose mother died a couple of months earlier in an industrial accident. For their film’s love interest, the guys enlist Alice (Elle Fanning) and Joe begins to grow close to her, despite his dad (Kyle Chandler) blaming her dad for the death of Joe’s mother. While shooting a scene late at night, the kids witness a massive train crash, caused by their science teacher. With his dying words he warns them not to tell anyone what they witnessed. As the military descend on the wreckage and odd things begin to happen around the town, it becomes clear the train was transporting something very strange…
How much all this achieves Abrams’ goal of feeling like a genuine Amblin movie, I’m not sure. On the surface, not that much: the visual style is all too modern, not to mention the CGI. But, tonally, there is something there, which has somehow survived being filtered through the filmmaking process and made its way into the finished product — it’s a bit of that spirit of adventure; the kind of storyline and characters; and, actually, the way it holds back a little on the effects work. Several people cite The Goonies when talking about it, which just reminds me that I really ought to get round to seeing that. (The fact it’s absolutely loved by some, while increasingly I hear people bravely sticking their heads over the parapet to say, “it’s not really that good, you know”, intrigues me rather.)
Unfortunately, the longer the film goes on the more it runs away with itself, as characters dash back and forth all over the place, sometimes in credibility-stretching fashion (we never do see how a group of kids manage to escape a heavily-guarded military base and drive back to an evacuated and blockaded town). The adults stumble through the story to little dramatic effect; Joe’s dad even has to be secretly locked up for a good chunk of the film (with no other characters noticing his disappearance) so that his storyline can be paused until he’s wheeled out for his part in the climax. The grown-ups do serve a role — giving us a perspective on events that the kids lack, and being tied to the emotional arcs of the leads — but it wouldn’t have harmed anything to limit them to those functions, rather than trying to half-heartedly give them stories of their own.
The kids are quite likeable in their way, especially Courtney and Fanning, who have enough chemistry to keep their interactions the most engaging aspect of the film. In fact, if Abrams wasn’t the kind of filmmaker he is, an indie-ish real-world take on Super 8’s dramatic storyline (a bunch of friends making a short film over the summer holidays, also with all the other grounded emotional aspects of the movie) might’ve made for an even more effective, enjoyable film. (Somewhat ironically, it seems this was Abrams’ original intention: according to IMDb, his two ideas for a follow-up to Mission: Impossible III were a coming-of-age story or an alien-on-the-loose adventure. Presumably getting sidetracked into Star Trek gave him the time to decide to combine them.)
In some respects, the kids’ short film (which plays during the end credits) encapsulates the whole movie: a semi-thought-through SF/F plot, a tacked on emotional arc, the apexes of both tied together in the climax, and a couple of sometimes-shoehorned effects set pieces along the way. Yet for all that, it does enough right that I’d quite like to see Abrams attempt more work along these lines.
J.J. Abrams’ most recent film, a little movie you’ve probably not heard of about something-or-other waking up (I forget the details), is out on DVD & Blu-ray in the UK today.
Score: 
The director of 
(unless you’re a Cannon aficionado, perhaps), but they were there, they lived it, and they have first-rate insights into the craziness. Craziness like the story of the competing Lambada movies, which ended up being released on the exact same day. I mean, you’d think one Lambada movie would be more than enough, but two, competing… If you wrote it in a fiction, the audience would laugh at the ridiculous contrivance of it, but it happened. Elsewhere, there’s a chunk where they just slag off Michael Winner for a bit (awesome), and director Franco Zeffirelli describes them as the best producers he ever worked with and the only ones he ever liked. Like I say, you couldn’t make it up.
(and if it’s told effectively, rather than the issue of if its telling is effective) is all that really matters.
When a warrior family are betrayed and killed, the surviving siblings seek vengeance.
I have many goals within my film viewing, quite apart from trying to watch 100 films every year. Some I’ve completed (the Rathbone Holmes series), others are almost done (every Spielberg film), others not so much (every Hitchcock film), and others I’ve barely begun (the Zatoichi series). One of these goals is to watch every Disney Animated Classic, their canon of feature animations that currently sits at 55 titles (with another scheduled for later this year, in the US at least). I did a pretty good job on the real classics while growing up, and have since filled the gaps of the modern classics, so I’m left ploughing through their lesser periods: the content they pumped out in the war-affected ’40s, and the post-Renaissance pre-Lasseter clusterfrack that was their ’00s produce. My best hope is to uncover a hidden gem while I mop up this dross.
but only because it has a moderately amusing reveal in the middle of it. The animation is unremarkable, besides some terrible CG intrusions. It seems to be under the impression that “hog” is a word for “cow”, based on the number of puns. A couple of gags do land — I even laughed out loud once, though I’ve forgotten why — but the majority is resolutely uninspired.
The first US feature from the director of 
These days, Steven Spielberg is as well-known for his Oscar-worthy historical prestige pictures as he is for his action-adventure genre movies, so it’s kinda strange (at least for me) to imagine the time in his career at which this film came about. I mean, it’s an adaptation of a controversial literary novel about the miserable lives of black women in the American South during the early decades of the 20th Century, directed by the white guy known for 
it never quite feels like we’re getting the full force of the story’s brutality. That’s a mixed blessing: as a viewer, we’re spared all the horrors you can infer from what actually happens; at the same time, how much should a story about such horrors be sparing us from them? Though as it was at one point advertised with the tagline, “
Spielberg’s first foray into Serious filmmaking is a long way from being an unqualified success, but it’s not a bad movie either, and at least it was the gateway to him making some superior dramas. Bonus points, too, for a mainstream big name director tackling a story about the historical lives of black women — depressingly, that still feels like it would be a noteworthy move 30 years later.
In this sci-fi romance, an alien intercepts the invitation included on the Voyager 2 space probe and tries to visit Earth, but is shot down. Taking the form of Karen Allen’s recently deceased husband, Jeff Bridges, he forces her to drive him to Arizona, where his people will rescue him in three days — if they can escape the attention of the government agents chasing them, anyway.
there are stalking POV shots as the alien arrives at Allen’s house, and then it grows a human body, a sequence in which the ugliest (prosthetic) baby you’ve ever seen stretches and creaks as it grows into an adult in mere minutes. It’s pretty freaky. Indeed, as per the BBFC, Starman “contains mild language, sex, violence and sci-fi horror”, but is rated PG. Ah, the good old days!
