Super 8

You know what? Just skip this review and see the movie. You have my permission. I'm not even going to reveal that much, but the less you know, the more fun you will have.

Super 8 is director J.J. Abrams' ode to the films that inspired him as a kid, and to the art of filmmaking itself. For me, it's perhaps best viewed on a VHS tape, recorded off the TV, with the HBO theme song playing before it. If I had seen this movie when I was ten years old, I would have begged my parents for a camcorder and got cracking. Unfortunately, at that age, I hadn't quite figured out that filmmaking was something you could just do.

Before Super 8 even started, I got a nostalgic thrill from seeing Elliott ride past the moon on his bicycle again in the old school Amblin Entertainment logo. That thrill pretty much lasted the entire movie. It feels exactly like all the Spielberg films I cherished as a kid. Much the way Tarantino does with his beloved exploitation movies, Abrams cherry picks moments and scenes from Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Goonies, Stand By Me, even Raiders of the Lost Ark, and repurposes them into something along those lines but new and different. He captures Spielberg's early visual flare and sense of suspense perfectly, as well as his knack for getting realistic, downright believable performances out of children. Of course, he has Spielberg himself along for the ride in a producing capacity, and that certainly doesn't hurt.

I won't go too deep into spoiler territory, since the marketing campaign has gone through so much trouble to spoil as little as possible, and not knowing where the movie is taking you just adds to that sense of wonder and enjoyment. Can you remember the days when trailers and endless marketing didn't give away the whole movie? I barely can. I grew up at the tail end of that time.

Super 8 is about a group of kids in 1979 setting out to make a zombie movie with a Super 8 camera. While shooting a scene, they find themselves right in the middle of a massive, disastrous, train crash. Things only deepen, as their whole town is affected by the crash, and the train's mysterious cargo.

That's really as far as the original teaser goes, even though I think they show a bit more in the later ones. But I'll stop there with the plot. If you heeded my advice, you're not even reading this anyway, you're watching the movie.

Like Spielberg's early movies, Super 8 deals a lot with broken homes. Joe, the main kid, recently lost his mother in an accident, and his dad, the Sheriff's Deputy, is having a hard time communicating with him, and Alice, the girl Joe likes, has a drunk dad and was abandoned by her mom. I thought it was interesting that the mothers were absent in Abrams' world, where it was always absent fathers in Spielberg's. I wonder if he just did that to switch things up, or if he really did have an absent mom? I don't know anything about him.

There are lots of little jumps and scares in Super 8, but it's not a straight-up horror movie. It's much more about the way these kids relate with their families and each other during this whole crisis. Charles, the director of their zombie movie, sees the military presence as an opportunity to add verisimilitude to his movie. I liked Charles a lot. In the 80's movies, the fat kid is there usually to be comic relief or more likely the loveable target. Charles, on the other hand, was smart, driven, bossy, and funny in a way that was in no way derived from his chunkiness. Good on you, J.J.

Super 8 took me back to being 10 or 11 years old again. All the movies you see as a kid are the ones that stay with you forever. Spielberg was a nut for the sci-fi and WWII movies he grew up on, and has built his entire career on pretty much just that. J.J. Abrams happened to come from the very best time in cinema history to be a kid, and shows us with Super 8 that he's still doing exactly what his young characters are doing in the movie: playing with his dad's camera.