Film Friday: Super 8 (2011)

I’ve never been a huge fan of The Goonies. The film is ok, but it feels lite to me, like Spielberg really didn’t put his all into it. Worse though, his penchant for ugly stereotypes really rubs me wrong in that one... the fat kid who can’t stop eating, the Asian kid who makes gadgets, the abusive jock. Blech. Anyway, Super 8 stinks. It’s like a low-rent version of The Goonies and the film is just a mess.

The Plot

Written and directed by J.J. Abrams, Super 8 is a mix of The Goonies and Close Encounters with a nasty streak. The film opens with a group of kids who are shooting a movie. The asthmatic kid wants the hot chick, but he’s forbidden from talking to her because her father skipped work, which resulted in the asthmatic kid’s mother taking his shift and thereby dying in a drunk driving incident which soured the relationship between their fathers. The fat kid also wants the dream girl and gets upset that the asthmatic kid stole her. The director kid is obnoxious. The dream girl’s father probably beats her. There are some other kids too, but honestly, neither I nor the film cared enough about them to remember who they are.

The kids go down to their local railroad station at night to make their film. As they are filming, they see a pickup truck drive up onto the tracks and strike an oncoming train head-on. This somehow derails the train right into the station but hurts none of the kids. Afterwards, the kids examine the wreckage and see little metal boxes everywhere.

Then the Air Force arrives. They refuse to talk to the local law enforcement or anyone else and they act like an invading force. They clean up the wreckage and then search the town for the notes of the man who drove the pickup track. He just happens to have been one of their scientists who told them they were evil and he now teaches at the local school.

Naturally, the Goonies investigate. As they do, the town starts to suffer mysterious attacks with equipment vanishing, electricity going out, and people getting killed... all from an invisible monster. The Air Force takes over, which upsets the asthmatic kid’s father, who just happens to be the new sheriff after the original sheriff is killed. But his attempts to stop the military come to naught as the military stages a false disaster and evacuates the town... but wait, the sheriff and the guy who “killed” his wife through no fault of his own sneak back into town to find their kids, who stayed for no reason I could make out. With all the main characters back in town, the alien suddenly appears, sucks up all the metal in town, including the necklace worn by the asthmatic kid with a picture of his dead mother in it, builds a spaceship out of it, and blasts off into space. Everyone cries. Roll the credits.

What This Film Does Wrong

This film is just really poorly thought out... kind of like Abrams’s prior projects. The motives are hopelessly muddled and everything is more complex than it needs to be. For example, rather than being a scientist on the run, the scientist needs to have first gotten a job in this town for some length of time... which raises the question of how he knew the train was coming or why he waited to do this or why the military waited to arrest him if he stole all the records he stole. The drunk driving death wasn’t just a drunk driving death, it was complicated by the whole “didn’t go to work” element that isn’t needed and which absolves the characters of real blame and creates confusion about why there is so much anger. For no reason I can see, the sheriff isn’t the sheriff, he’s the deputy until the sheriff is killed by accident.

Even worse, things like the motives get forgotten a few minutes after they are announced. For example, the asthmatic kid and the fat kid compete for the dream girl, and the fat kid seems upset, until he isn’t. The whole story they set up for the fat kid and the director kid actually just stops halfway through the film as the characters are essentially ushered off the screen and never reappear. Similarly, the two fathers hate each other, until they suddenly don’t... even though they do nothing that would trigger a reconciliation. Indeed, what causes their reconciliation is that the sheriff nonsensically demands the help of the drunk when he learns that their kids have stayed behind in the evacuated town... something his character would never do in real life.

The monster is a mess too. It’s invisible so you never really see it until the end. When it first appears (after escaping the train), it steals electrical equipment from around town in some manner that can’t be explained, but is suggested to involve magnetic power. It also kills several innocent bystanders. So it’s an evil monster right? Well, maybe. But near the end, we see film footage from the teacher who started everything and he claims it’s just a lonely monster trying to get home, i.e. ET, except that the big bad military guys have been making it angry... hulk angry... and we wouldn’t like it if we made it angry. A few minutes later, in a heavily manipulative scene, the monster sucks up the pendant worn by the asthmatic kid and suddenly we’re supposed to believe it’s a wonderful happy creature and we should feel sad about it leaving... ignore the bodies of the innocent people it killed. None of this is set up or consistent with the actions of the monster. In fact, we know nothing about the monster, except that it kills, until right before the moment we're supposed to suddenly fall in love with the monster.

To give you a further sense of how poorly thought out this film is, the film takes place in 1979 for no apparent reason whatsoever. The fact it happens in 1979 never once comes up or means anything. You might not even notice it, quite frankly.

Incidentally, the film is called Super 8 after the type of film the kids are using, and they do film the train wreck, but ultimately their film is irrelevant to the plot. There’s no discovery from the film and the fact they have it never moves the plot.

What this film feels like is someone looked at Spielberg’s old catalog and took out pieces of his films without grasping the substance of what gave them their appeal. Then he wrote a minimalist story around those ideas and filled in the gaps with motives with overly-complex backstories, motives that would be forgotten the moment the filler scene ended, and relationships that are set up but then dismissed as the film progresses. The end result is a film that’s watchable, but pointless. There is nothing at all creative or original in this film. There isn’t a character you care about. There isn’t a plot point that is at all exciting. And even the mystery of the monster isn’t enough to pique your curiosity.

In all honesty, this is how J.J. Abrams rolls. He’s all about false potential. He takes well-known images but abandons their substance. Then he puts them into uninteresting knock-off stories. The one time he didn’t, i.e. Lost, he set up false mysteries with no clue how to pay them off. Abrams is a pretentious Michael Bay.

Blech.