Our extended family has taken a weekend trip to Mackinac Island every summer for close to thirty years. I thought of that trip while watching the movie Super 8. (I know, I know, I’m only six months behind in reviewing this film, but give me a break. I see movies on my schedule, not the studio’s.) First of all, there’s actually a mention of Mackinac Island in the movie, which made me smile. But beyond that, there’s this:
Usually we head home on Sunday from the Island, but one year we stayed in Mackinac City an extra night. Some of our group headed for a water park, while I persuaded the less adventurous to go on the Sunday Evening Vespers cruise. Instead of going to the island, our ferry boat meandered under the Mackinac Bridge for a while. There is something unique about looking up at the bridge from the water. While we were there, my step-mother, a picture-taking enthusiast, made me chuckle when she pointed her camera upward and said, “I’ve never taken this picture before.”
It was a Yogi Berra-esque moment. Of course whenever you snap the shutter on a camera you’ve never taken that picture before, but I knew exactly what she meant. Over the course of thirty years at Mackinac she’s taken every picture there is to take again and again and again. But she’d never taken pictures of cars and trucks going over the bridge from 200 feet below them.
Why did Super 8 make me think of that? Because Super 8 gave me the exact opposite feeling. I kept saying to myself, “I’ve seen this movie before.” I just couldn’t decide which movie it was. There’s a bus crash straight out of The Fugitive. I thought of Harry Potter when watching a home movie of a deceased parent and infant child. The kids keeping a secret made me think of Stand by Me and there are a several scenes straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Mostly, though, I thought of ET. Steven Spielberg could have sued JJ Abrams for plagiarism, except Spielberg produced the movie, so one suspects the liberal borrowing was done not only with the master’s blessing, but with his help.
Now let me say this: I enjoyed the movie. It was a lot of fun to watch. Or I should say the first thre-quarters or so were a lot of fun. The scene early on where Alice rehearses what she’s going to say when the camera starts rolling in the zombie movie the kids are making and the boys are dumbfounded by the emotional energy she is able to summon up is solid gold (or, better yet, "mint," to use the language of the movie). Having lived through junior high school, I can attest to the truth of that scene – early adolescent girls have so much more going on inside of them than early adolescent boys. All the riddles of the first half of the movie were wonderful. Abrams the student imitated Spielberg the master extremely well. But as the movie kept going, Abrams’ level of excellence slipped. I didn’t feel the resolution of the riddles that were so wonderfully set up carried the emotional heft that the early Spielberg films carried. By the time total chaos had erupted in the town with tanks riding out of control and bullets flying everywhere I felt like the film had gone out of control, too.
Some may complain that the movie was too over-the-top, but I think we actually needed a bit more, not less. (Plot spoiler alert!) We needed to know more about the hatred between the two fathers and how they resolved their differences. We needed to know more about the government’s involvement in this project – was the decimation of the town only the work of a rogue Air Force colonel or were other, more powerful forces behind his actions? And, ultimately, it would have worked much, much better if the creature needed something to escape that young Joe Lamb was able to provide. (Why stop channeling ET now?) As it was, things happened but weren’t fully explained. For the first hour or so, I felt I was watching a great movie. By the end I felt like it was almost a great movie. Still, I’m glad I watched it. I haven’t enjoyed a bunch of kids in a movie together that much since the aforementioned Stand by Me. I especially enjoyed Dakota Fanning’s little sister Elle as Alice. But all the kids were great, from the Tom Petty look-alike kid who constantly wanted to blow things up to the overbearing kid who was directing the film within the film. Plus any movie with the line, “I guess I could get back into disco” is worth watching.
So, if you took a pass this summer on Super 8, give it a whirl now that it’s out on DVD. Especially make sure to watch it if you loved the films Steven Spielberg made “back in the day.” I give it an affectionate three stars out of four.
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