Review: Super 8
J. J. Abrams, devotee and renovator of such franchises as Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, continues on his merry panegyric way with his new film, Super 8. Set in small-town Ohio in 1979, Super 8 is an ode to a cluster of movies—early-’80s Spielberg in particular, but also contemporaneous work by George Lucas, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and Ridley Scott—that influenced Abrams as an adolescent and a budding filmmaker. The heroes of Super 8, a group of young teenagers, are shooting an 8mm zombie film when they get caught up in a gee-whiz-for-real movie scenario: a terrifying train crash, an ominous warning from a half-dead scientist with a gun, and a series of bizarre phenomena which strongly suggest the presence of an extraterrestrial being.
I have a soft spot for action/sci-fi blockbusters (including Abrams’s frivolous but witty take on Star Trek), and I wanted to like Super 8. Abrams is a relentless crowd-pleaser, so I didn’t go in expecting something especially complex or challenging—no Children of Men—but I thought I could enjoy Super 8 for what it was. And there were hopeful signs at first: the teenagers were endearing (mostly in that goofy Henry Thomas/Joe Mazzello way that Spielberg perfected), the script seemed pretty smart, and the train derailment was genuinely shocking. My buzz didn’t last long, though; maybe the Amblin magic pixie dust doesn’t work on me the way it used to. It became increasingly clear as it unspooled that Super 8 was a shallow, cynical product—and now I’m finding it difficult not to be cynical in response.
Given its incessant and reverential aping of an old-fashioned aesthetic, Super 8 is a deeply nostalgic film. The easiest thing would be to say that the film’s vacuity is due to its nostalgia and move on, but of course there are more and less interesting ways to deploy nostalgia. The best counterexample on this front is Joe Dante’s Matinee. Like Super 8, Matinee is a personal project by a mid-forties Hollywood director revisiting the cinematic experiences of his early adolescence. Dante’s film, in which a teenage boy turns to B-movies as an escape from the threat of nuclear war, is highly nostalgic, but it casts an interrogative, self-reflective eye on that nostalgia, refusing to allow an uncritical return to some idealised past. Matinee is an intensely personal film, and one with a keen sense of the relationship between pop culture and socio-political context.
Super 8, of course, has much higher production values than Matinee. Its action sequences are louder and more thrilling, its dialogue and performances are more naturalistic, its cinematography more impressive, its special effects several times more sophisticated. As is so often the case, though, this shiny exterior (which I confess is what drew me to the film in the first place!) masks the absence of any real thematic, critical, or even personal substance. The film’s slickness—the efficiency with which it delivers a stock-standard, well-worn cinematic experience—is actually the scariest thing about it. Abrams has said that the film is more “a kind of revisiting of [his] childhood” than a Spielberg homage, but there are no rough edges to suggest the places where his personal vision might have clashed with the pecuniary oversight of his studio bosses. Even the production of the amateur zombie film, which starts out as an intriguing subplot, becomes thematically inert after the end of the first act. It becomes just another polished surface.
I know it’s easy to be negative. Maybe if I put my mind to it I could read the film “against the grain” and tease out a more interesting subtext, or perhaps take a postmodern approach and read it as a kind of pastiche of the earlier films. Much shoddier movies have been salvaged from the junkpile (usually by better critics than me). The repugnant thing about Super 8, though, is the way its finely-crafted facades repel sustained scrutiny. It’s a difficult film to think about, and that disturbs me. Absent any real personal or critical material, the film’s “philosophy” is as flawless and desolate as the rest of it: “Bad things happen, and it’s no one’s fault. I’m sorry.” Yep, it’s a harsh world! Why would you face it, when you can go watch Spielberg movies instead?
