Super 8
Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning
Director JJ Abrams
Review Ray Chan
Joel Courtney leads a cast of talented kid actors as Joe Lamb, the middle-school-aged son of Jack (Kyle Chandler), a sheriff’s deputy who struggles with the demands of single parenthood after his wife dies in a steel mill accident.
Joe copes by escaping into a world of models and monster magazines, and fills his free hours making a zombie film with his movie-mad pal Charles (Riley Griffiths).
Filming surreptitiously at an abandoned train station one night, they witness a train derailment that ushers in a series of mysterious happenings that might be explained by events they unwittingly captured on the Super 8 camera.
The scene is presented brilliantly as the sound of screeching metal fills the air while cars tumble aimlessly across the tracks.
It’s the first of many sequences which show the influence of the movie's producer Steven Spielberg on J.J. Abrams, who readily admits that this new offering is a homage to the man who has become the most successful director in Hollywood history.
Abrams shows he has been a keen student of Spielberg’s techniques, adopting style and substance from Jaws to E.T. to Close Encounters, with parts of The Goonies thrown in for good measure.
Saying more about what happens after the train incident would spoil Super 8’s carefully cultivated aura of mystery, but suffice it to say that what follows won’t be too surprising to those who have seen the aforementioned films that lend this their DNA.
That makes the picture both welcomingly and frustratingly familiar, and more the latter as it goes along.
But A for effort. Super 8 constructs a believably complicated small-town world, fills it with the right period details and shoots it beautifully, testing the residents’ sense of order and willingness to stand up to authority to cope with a chaotic element that could destroy them.
Borrowed the pleasures may be, but who better to imitate if the object is to flatter?
