Super 8 movie review & film summary (2011)
Meanwhile, human elements come into play. Joe's mother was killed not long ago in an accident at the steel mill. He mourns her. His father, Deputy Sheriff Jack Lamb (Kyle Chandler). has grown distant and depressive. Joe begins to bond with Alice, who is two years older but sympathetic and nice. There's an oddly touching scene where he helps her with her zombie makeup.
It is a requirement of these films that adults be largely absent. The kids get involved up to their necks, but the grown-ups seem slow to realize strange things are happening. Here, the mystery centers on the cargo of the cars in the train wreck, and on the sudden materialization of U.S. Air Force investigators and troops in town. If we don't instinctively know it from this movie, we know it from a dozen earlier ones: The authorities are trying to cover up something frightening, and the kids are on the case.
During the first hour of "Super 8," I was elated by how good it was. It was like seeing a lost early Spielberg classic. Then something started to slip. The key relationship of Alice and her troubled father Louis (Ron Eldard) went through an arbitrary U-turn. Joe's own father seemed to sway with the requirements of the plot. The presentation of the threat was done with obscure and unconvincing special effects. We want the human stories and the danger to mesh perfectly, and they seem to slip past one another.
All the same, "Super 8" is a wonderful film, nostalgia not for a time but for a style of filmmaking, when shell-shocked young audiences were told a story and not pounded over the head with aggressive action. Abrams treats early adolescence with tenderness and affection. He uses his camera to accumulate emotion. He has the rural town locations right.
And he does an especially good job with Joe, Alice, Charles and their friends, especially Cary (Ryan Lee). You know how a lot of heist and action movies have an explosives expert? Cary is the kid who is always playing with matches and fireworks. There was always some kid like that in school. The grown-ups said if he kept on like that he'd blow off a finger. We were rather grateful for the suspense.
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