Review of Super 8 (2011) by Christopher R — 18 Jul 2013

After finding J. J. Abrams Star Trek reboot to be a complete misfire, I often thought that my reasoning may have been too colored by my affections for the cerebral tone of the original Star Trek and seeing it replaced by a conventional action movie. After seeing Abrams Super 8, I now see that my impression of Abrams as a plagiarizing hack who rips off the best of other filmmakers and represents them in overwrought and tone deaf fashion was right on the money. Abrams movie is pretty much a lesson on how not to write an effective screenplay.

1. While the movie is supposed to be an homage to early Spielberg, it takes fifteen minutes before a train explodes having been derailed by a pickup truck. (?!) Not only does this not make any sense, even after the movie explains the back story of the event, but the fact that Abrams can only be bothered to have fifteen minutes of character development before giving us a sequence that would make Michael Bay seem restrained defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.

2. Speaking of the setting, the movie is set in the 70s but has no reason for being set in the 70s. For instance, when the movie Boogie Nights was set in the 70s this was because the backdrop was the transition of the adult film industry from film to video. When X-men: First Class was set in the 60s this was to take advantage of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a part of the plot. When a movie is a period movie it needs to have a reason to justify that choice. When you use it as a gimmick but then poke the audience in the ribs every five seconds (look that guy is listening to a Walkman!) it becomes a distraction at best and unintentionally absurd at worst.

3. While the military being both evil and stupid in these kinds of movies is a convention, this movie sets a new standard for military idiocy. It reduces the human elements of the story to cartoon characters and a chance to have some depth to the conflict between the military, the town and the monster is completely squandered.

4. Speaking of characters, while all the kids are relatively well written and acted, the adults in the film are unbelievable ridiculous caricatures . Kyle Chandler's deputy character gets detained by the military, but despite being an officer of the law fights his way out, impersonates a military officer and destroys military property. In other words, he behaves like a character out of a brainless action movie. Ron Edlard as the drunk father of Elle Fanning's character is even more ridiculous. There is a subplot about conflict between the two families because Chandler's characters wife died in an accident while covering a shift at the factory that Edlard's character was supposed to work. Not only is this an incredibly flimsy attempt at creating drama, and the characters behave very unrealistically, it seems disingenuous once you realize that it only functions as a device to create conflict in the budding romance of the teenage protagonists.

5. The nature of the alien is structured like a mystery. This would have worked really well if anything about the alien made any kind of sense. I still don't understand why the alien ship was able to form itself and fly away at the end of the movie but not fifteen minutes earlier or even an hour earlier. Also, the alien looks like a pretty generic monster. We never learn anything interesting about it or even why the mess of the plot should make a single lick of sense. Instead of a complex plot we just get a series of stuff that happened.