Super 8

TedFlicks Rating:

$6.75 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50

E.T. GETS TOUGH

With a title like “Super 8” a movie can be about only two things, a large, eight-cylinder Packard automobile or film stock.  Since the last Super Eight Packard was built in 1950, and few of today’s film audience have ever heard of or seen one, filmmakers wisely chose the less obsolete film stock that was popular both with amateurs and film schools in the 1970s and 1980s.  Pic, the sophomore effort of helmer J.J. Abrams, whose freshman pic, the 2009 Star Trek, also dealt with science fiction, is set in Lillian, Ohio, in 1979.  Had it been produced and released then, Steven Spielberg’s 1982 hit, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, might have had a cooler reception.  The “star” of “Super 8” is a rather large, ugly, greasy-gooey extra-terrestrial who was captured by the US Air Force in 1958 when his space ship fell to Earth.  The extra-terrestrial has magnetic powers and is good at shape-shifting objects.  He’s nothing like the “Casper the Friendly Ghost” character of Spielberg’s flick.  In the interest of suspense, none of this is revealed until pic’s penultimate reel.  Unfortunately, suspense is what “Super 8” fails to build.

PG-13 rated pic gets kudos for set design, costume, and soundtrack.  The cars place it squarely in the Jimmy Carter era.  Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” on the radio is a dead giveaway for 1979, and the costumes are right for the period.  At 113 minutes, watching it is not torture, but it’s hardly a walk in the park on a sunny day.

Plot centers on five junior high school students and their parents.  The fat kid (Charles, played by Riley Griffiths) is the Cecil B. DeMille wannabe.  The nice cute kid, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) has recently lost his mother in a steel mill accident when she covered for the absent Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard) who had missed his shift.  Joe is the fat kid’s enabler.  His mom’s death sets up the tension between the Lamb and Dainard families — and in case one doesn’t get the point, Louis is ejected from Mrs. Lamb’s funeral in the opening reel.  Joe’s dad, Jackson, is the town’s sheriff’s deputy, played by the capable Kyle Chandler.

Pic’s problem is that it has only three sympathetic characters, Joe, his dad Jackson, and Alice Dainard, Louis’ teenage daughter played by the very talented Elle Fanning, who stole the show in the 2010 Somewhere, directed by Sofia Coppola.  She does the same in all her scenes in “Super 8.”  Alice is in Charles’ film.  There are two subplots:  Making Charles’ movie and the teenage crush between Joe and Alice.  Rest of pic is a detective story in which the kids prove smarter than the adults.  By the way, this is not “The Hardy Boys” or “Nancy Drew.”  It’s a lot uglier.

Pic’s first revelation could have been a dead end.  The beloved junior high science teacher, Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), has crashed his pickup on a railroad track into a classified US Air Force freight train.  He derails the train in a spectacular series of explosions from which he ought to be dead.  He isn’t.  Instead he ends up in custody of Air Force medics.  The kid filmmakers are shooting at the time of the derailment and capture it.

A few devices, none of which is incomprehensible in context, move the plot along.  They include the power going off throughout the town, large metal objects such as TV sets and automobiles suddenly flying through the air as if through their own volition, dogs leaving town, and the local sheriff killed in a freak accident.

Back in the day, it took a while to get film developed, especially if one lived in small town America.  Accordingly the kids don’t get a good look at what they shot at the train crash for a few days.  When they do, they learn about the ugly extra-terrestrial who was on the crashed train.  They then find a treasure trove of film cans, the contents of which explain the entire story and why Dr. Woodward risked suicide to stop the train, and that Dr. Woodward was involved with the Air Force when the E.T. was captured and that he objected to its treatment.

Meanwhile, the Air Force has set fire to Lillian, Ohio in order to force an evacuation.  They want to get the E.T. back on the rails before anyone else finds out.  Lucky for them it wasn’t New York.  But the plucky kids and Joe’s dad, Jackson the deputy, beat the Air Force at their own game.  The kids spring the creature from the cave where it is hiding, and the rest is history.

Pic does, however beg a few questions, not the least of which is why set it in 1979?  And why in Heaven’s name would the Air Force, which has thousands of planes at its disposal, risk taking a creature from outer space across America on dilapidated freight railroads?  Why does Dr. Woodward, who has been separated from the Air Force for fifteen plus years, have a map of the entire route of this transcontinental train?

These questions could have been overlooked if pic actually had built some suspense.  It has the seeds: the Romeo & Juliette action between Joe and Alice, the adventure of Dr. Woodward who hid in plain sight in a small town after separating from the Air Force, a supposedly real creature from outer space, and a determined deputy sheriff who takes on the US Air Force.  Pic’s failure to work any of this into suspense or even audience sympathy is its real failing.  Think about it.  Spielberg’s E.T. was a cute little kid from outer-space on a bicycle.  Everything about him fairly shrieked amiability.  Audiences cared about him.  The creature in Super 8 has none of that.

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