- UK release: August 2011
- Director: J. J. Abrams · Writer: J. J. Abrams
- Studio / distributor: Paramount Pictures; Amblin Entertainment; Bad Robot
- Genre: Science fiction adventure / coming-of-age mystery · Runtime: 112 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Joel Courtney as Joe Lamb; Elle Fanning (Somewhere, Babel) as Alice Dainard; Kyle Chandler (King Kong) as Deputy Jackson Lamb; Noah Emmerich (The Truman Show, Little Children) as Nelec
- IMDb: 7.0 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 81% critics / 75% audience · My rating: 9 / 10
J. J. Abrams has spent the last few years rebooting other people’s toys: a younger, faster Star Trek, an entry in the Mission: Impossible run, the monster-in-Manhattan riddle of Cloverfield. Super 8 is the first time he has reached back to the films that clearly made him want to do any of this in the first place, and it has Steven Spielberg’s name on the producer credit to underline the point. This is a Spielberg homage made with Spielberg sitting in the next chair, which could easily have curdled into pastiche. It does not, because Abrams remembers the part of those films that the imitators always forget: the kids are real before the spectacle arrives.
The setup
The summer of 1979, a small steel town in Ohio. Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) has just lost his mother in an accident at the mill, and his father, the deputy sheriff, has no idea what to do with him. Joe pours himself into helping his friend Charles make a zombie film on a Super 8 camera, the sort of ambitious, over-serious backyard production every cine-literate teenager has attempted. Filming a scene at the station one night, the gang witness a pickup truck drive onto the tracks and derail a passing military train in a catastrophe of biblical scale. Something gets out of one of the wrecked cars. The Air Force descends on the town, the dogs start running away, engines and appliances start vanishing, and the children, who caught more than they meant to on their little reel of film, find themselves the only people asking the right questions.
The cast
The film lives or dies on its children, and Abrams has cast them with care. Joel Courtney, in his first feature, carries the lead with an unforced gravity; Joe’s grief is present in every scene without ever being underlined. Elle Fanning, already a confident screen presence after Somewhere, is the standout. There is a moment where her character rehearses a scene for the home movie and visibly becomes a better actor in front of the others, and Fanning plays that shift so cleanly that the boys’ stunned silence feels like ours. Kyle Chandler gives the grieving deputy father a stiff, decent helplessness, and the ensemble of friends, all sarcasm, asthma and pyrotechnics, bicker with the rhythm of kids who have known each other their whole short lives. Noah Emmerich supplies the necessary cold front as the colonel running the cover-up.
The craft
Larry Fong shoots the town in warm dusk and lens flares, and the period is built from texture rather than nostalgia signposting: Walkmans, drive-in marquees, the specific orange light of a 1970s kitchen. Michael Giacchino’s score does the Amblin thing of swelling exactly when a child looks up at something enormous, and it earns the swell. The train crash is a genuinely overwhelming set piece, all rending metal and tumbling carriages, staged with a maximalism that sits oddly against the intimacy of the rest, though it is undeniably thrilling. Abrams keeps the creature itself mostly off screen for an hour, which is the right instinct and the most Spielbergian choice in the film: the unseen thing in the dark is always scarier than the rendered one.
How it stacks up
The reference points are not subtle, and the film knows it. This is E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goonies run through a single sensibility, with the bicycle-gang adventure of one and the cosmic awe of the others. Where Cloverfield hid its monster behind a shaky camcorder, Super 8 hides its own behind a child’s Super 8 reel, and the parallel is clearly deliberate. It shares DNA, too, with Stand by Me, in the way the supernatural plot is really a frame for a story about boys on the edge of growing up. The film is most itself when it stays in that register, and weakest when the conspiracy machinery grinds into gear and starts behaving like every other creature feature.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have responded warmly, sitting around 81%, with the recurring praise landing on the young cast, the period feel and the sincerity, and the recurring complaint that the final act resolves into something more familiar than the wonderful first hour promised. Audiences are a touch cooler at 75%, which I suspect reflects anyone who came for Cloverfield and got a coming-of-age drama with a monster in it. I think the audience that feels short-changed has misjudged what they were sold. The home-movie heart is the good part, not the thing in the way of the good part.
Verdict
I came out of this grinning. It works almost completely as the thing it sets out to be: a summer adventure about kids, loss and the strange, told with real craft and a deep affection for the films it descends from. The third act is the weakest stretch, and the creature, once fully seen, is less interesting than the idea of it. None of that dents the rewatch appeal, which is high; this is exactly the sort of warm, funny, beautifully made film I will happily put on again. It honours its influences without merely copying them, and it gives its young cast room to be properly good. 9⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. The film-within-a-film plays in full over the closing credits, so do not leave early.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Super 8 turned out to be a clear forerunner of Stranger Things (2016), which took the same 1980s small-town, kids-versus-secret-government-monster formula to a streaming generation and made it a phenomenon. Abrams went on to bring his nostalgia instincts to the Star Wars sequels with The Force Awakens (2015). The film has settled into its reputation as a fond, slightly underrated Amblin tribute, stronger in its first half than its last. It is now widely available on disc and digital and turns up on streaming services depending on your region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for one use of strong language, moderate threat and soft drug use. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Threat and horror: The young friends find themselves in several dangerous and tense situations, which include a train crash and various scenarios in which people disappear or come under attack from a mysterious force. The threat carries a degree of intensity, including moments designed to make the audience jump, but these are not overly sustained or disturbing.
Language: There is infrequent strong language (‘f***k’); other language includes uses of the terms ‘Jesus’, ‘hell’, ‘asshole’, ‘shit’, ‘bitching’, ‘pussy’, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘piss’, ‘douche’ and ‘dick’.
Drugs: A man is briefly seen smoking marijuana. The drug misuse is criticised and is not glamorised.
Additional issues: There is occasional sight of bloody injury. A young boy enjoys using fireworks; occasionally he does so in an irresponsible manner, but this behaviour is clearly condoned.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
