Be Excellent To Each Other

Bit too long for the movie thread, so here you go - warning, spoilers a go-go:


Super-8

To quote Frank Costanza, “I’ve got some issues here, and you’re gonna here about them!”


It seemed impossible to mess up. It had all the right ingredients. Small town America. Young friends coming of age. An appeal to the golden age of monster cinema married with the child like wonder of Spielberg’s classics. Unfortunately Super-8 not only grievously over-eggs its pudding but it throws in inferior ingredients one after another and completely undercooks the recipe.

Super-8 kicks off reasonably well. The opening scene is visually well played. Joe Lamb (played by the competent Joel Courtney) sits outside in the cold on his swing as a wake for his mother is held in the house behind him. His father, impassive in his grief, accepts condolences. Information is subtly dropped as to their relationship by relatives. We get a good feel for Joe’s pain and his estrangement from his father through deft visual clues and some restrained acting.

The camera falls on three of Joe’s friends. Tall thin kid, weird-looking kid and chubster kid. They begin to speak… and a small warning light blinks on in my mind. The small, innocuous warning light that always kicks off a crisis in the cabin of an airplane, detailing something that isn’t quite right but hey… everything else is working so far, relax. What’s the beef…? Well, it’s the dialogue fed these kids. I just can’t accept that any kid would make character-revealing wisecracks at a wake of their best friend’s mum. But these ones do. And it’s a key problem that grows and grows throughout the film, one of an extreme emotional shallowness and a propensity to resort to one liners and verbal banter that may sound good on page, but completely fails in evoking a plausible childhood friendship.

And it’s childhood relationships that drive these sorts of films. JJ Abrams has nailed his flag to a pole. This film clearly wants to be in the same stable as Stand By Me with the four self reliant kids discovering emotional truths. It also wants to share in the giddy and silly exploits of The Goonies. But in addition it wants to add the wide-eyed wonder and need that E.T evokes. And not only that but it also wants to bring an anarchic Joe Dante vibe to proceedings with firecrackers and things that go bump in the night.

These ingredients could plausibly mix, but they need great care and attention… a little too…

Oh no, wait! Abrams has a huge bowl of something and with a mad, bespectacled grin on his face he’s trying to add more…

The truck-driving government conspiracies and hoodwinking evacuations of Close Encounters of the Third Kind! The hard as nails evil non-human hating chief who’ll stop at nothing from Avatar! The alien who just wants to go home from E.T! The evil monster alien from Cloverfield! The town-meeting Sherrif-out-of-his-depth hi-jinks of Jaws! The big small town kablammo of the opening of War of the Worlds! It’s all poured into the pan, smothering something simmering promisingly away.

But maybe Abrams can pull this off, right? After all Star Trek was awesome and he dealt with a big cast and lots of converging elements there, right?

Star Trek didn’t have kids in it though. And when it comes to kids Abrams is no Spielberg. Spielberg knew how to coax incredible performances from kids. Only when he was on autopilot with such films as Hook did sappiness and horrible mugging to camera undo his work. But look at those aforementioned films, and look at the films of Joe Dante too. Great child acting. Abrams doesn’t do too badly with his leads. Joe struggles to evoke anything deep but is an affable and engaging lad. Elle Fanning brings her usual amazingly accomplished acting to the mix. But the three other leads… oy vey.

Charles Kaznyk can’t really act – he comes perilously close at times, but he can’t. He plays chubster kid remember. Pretty much all we know about him is that he’s a bit tubby and he likes making films. Later on we suddenly find out he had the hots for Elle, which is played as a key moment for all of forty seconds and then entirely dropped. Then we have Weird-looking Kid, or Pyro-Kid as I shall call him now, as it is shorter. Pyro-Kid likes explosions and is short and excitable. That’s it really. His valuable contribution to friendship is to carry a vital plot-aiding device to the end of the film. Tall Kid throws up and is nervous and er… tall.

None of them will shut the fuck up.

It’s bloody irritating. I know we have to have them along for the ride due to the entire kid and his friends making Super-8 movie gubbins but by God, does Abrams completely fail to write an engaging character in shorthand. Again, compare to the master, Spielberg. The friends of Elliot didn’t hog the screen, they didn’t even say much but they were there and a part of his life and they felt so natural. When they had something to say it’d advance Elliot’s character a long a little or the plot, and it would always be so carefully scripted and coaxingly acted that it had all the naturalism and off-hand truth that only an innocent could attain.

Super-8’s kids ping-pong between “LOOK AT ME! I’M REACTING TO A MONSTER!” to “I am witnessing a telegraphed emotional truth,” through to the monstrously repetitive “I have here a quip. Hear me speak.”

Argh.

A repeated and key problem with the straining-to-be-emotional parts of Super-8 is that they barely register before Joe is hustled along to the next comedy bit / monster attack / big revelation. Each time Joe goes a little wide and misty eyed. The medicore score (by the usually highly reliable Michael Giachinno) goes all sad. The camera lingers a moment. Then bam! On to the next bit and Joe – lacking any real character growth – moves on exactly the same as before. It almost becomes a parody of those cheesy soap opera moments. The single tear. The walk-out. And then next scene everything back to normal. No matter how well crafted these scenes are (and they are damningly workmanlike) they won’t mean a damn unless Joe moves on a little each time and progressively carries some extra weight on his shoulders. With some sort of coherent structure to the film, some sort of journey for Joe, there’d be fulfilment. But no lessons are being taught, no barriers are being broken. For example Joe’s dad is a loving father who has grown withdrawn since the loss of his wife. Yet since the film shows some glimpses of tenderness between them and since there’s no darker underlying alienation, it’s pretty evident that time will heal wounds and they’ll see the need for each other again. The big problem with the film is that it spends most of the time with the two of these characters far apart, with the only contact between them really being about Joe being ‘threatened’ with baseball camp (which his dad seems to drop immediately at his protest) and his dad stopping him from seeing his girl. Yet at the end of the film it acts as if they have learned something valuable about each other. But they haven’t. What has actually happened is that dad’s been concerned for the kid while a big monster runs around, but kid manages to handle himself and they get together at the end. Fair enough, but the film acts as if some great profound secret has been unlocked and that the tears are well and truly flowing. It’s as if you had the triumphant medal giving ending to Star Wars following a battle where Luke casually pimp-slapped Darth Vader and pushed an explodo-button without breaking a sweat. It’s not earned. You can’t get all teary at the end of a film simply because the score and the visuals tell you too, there has to be a real connection. It didn’t help that the last film I saw before this one was Tree of Life, which also features a boy alienated from his father. But Tree of Life handles it with barely any dialogue, with father and son constantly sharing the same space but a universe apart belief-wise. The acting in that film was something else too, and it genuinely felt like childhood, and the mixed fear and eventual rage at the love of an authoritarian parent.

Again, a film could survive this disconnect if it was a subplot, and if the main plot was handled well enough. It isn’t. Super-8 is ostensibly about an alien that has crash landed and can’t fix his ship. The army take him away and experiment on him. Alien gets loose in the kid’s town and tries to rebuild his ship. Alien finds out humans aren’t all bad with telepathic connection to kid. Now, with this little summary places it comfortably within your standard E.T fare. Such a film frequently kicks off with a mystery, which the kid uncovers, and he rescues the alien and they bond and after a few setbacks he helps the alien escape the mean G-Men.

But in Super-8 the alien kills people. It either kills them outright or brings them to its hideout to snack on whilst it modifies the van. Confusingly, it keeps doing this despite picking them up and presumably having telepathic bonds – yet at the end of the film, the same grabbing of the kid in preperation of a light snack has the alien realising that maybe humans aren’t so bad after all, and flying off. We being led to believe that Joe’s the only one who’s had some moving experience lately and everyone else is peachy for the menu. Frankly, this doesn’t make for a sympathetic alien. It’s like I had a basketful of kittens and munched my way through ‘em, but stopped on the last one because it mewled and rubbed it’s nose against my hand. I’m still a bastard Kitten Muncher. I mean, what, the alien can’t eat cows? Ohio is a goddamnned farm state.

“But the alien has been treated wickedly by the military, and thus is enraged!” I hear you cry. Yeah, that makes sense. Or it would if the alien kept itself to snacking on mean military men. But we already saw earlier on that a connection had been made with kindly black scientist, so it already KNEW that everyone wasn’t all bad. Yet instead of eating soldiers it sticks to townsfolk who we assume have normal, everyday lives with deepseated pleasing memories of Christmasses and first loves.

It doesn’t make for a sympathetic alien. It just makes for one that’s picky with its food. And unlike the film’s of the 70’s and 80’s, it’s a completely unmemorable design.

So if the alien is all destructo, maybe the film’s going the way of the Dante ones where the kid has to use all his cunning to defeat the big bad. Like in Gremlins. In Gremlins Billy Pelzer improvises to heroically contain a rapidly escalating calamity of his own doing. The Gremlins having been lured into one place, he bravely sneaks in and burns it down. Later, he goes mono-et-mono against the lead Gremlin and defeats it. Billy has learnt responsibility, become assertive and has got the girl.

In Super-8, Joe witnesses a train crash. Then he witnesses odd things going on. Then he witnesses a monster in someone’s garage. Then he sneaks into a base where he gets captured, but then escapes to do some more witnessing. Then he witnesses a big battle. Then he goes down a tunnel and saves a girl thanks to Pyro-Kid’s painfully telegraphed Pyro-Plot-Solving-Moment. Then he witnesses the alien leaving.

He doesn’t actually really do anything.

Now a film where a character is a helpless witness to terrible events out of his control can be an effective one. It worked in War of the Worlds. It worked in The Pianist. It worked in… um… Witness. But you have to have an emotional connection with the character. You have to view the world through their eyes. And you have to share a journey that ends with them having changed. Nothing has changed about Joe. He’s exactly the same as at the start. His dad has changed a bit, but the film isn’t about him and we haven’t spent enough time to really root for him. And where we were immersed in the focused emotional space of these oppressed characters in other films, in Super-8 we have Joe’s presence constantly obscured by the witless banter of kids from central casting.

This film is so deriative of Spielberg and Dante that it seems purely an exercise in copying from someone elses exam paper. There’s nothing new there. There’s certainly no passion. At first I wondered if there was, if they’d just bungled it. I think there was some spark in the creation of the idea. After all, it’s a neat concept if properly executed. But the ‘and then this happened’ completely motiveless story and the rote plot torpedoes it. It really needed to be rewritten. And then painfully crafted. Like what Spielberg used to do. Because he was a craftsman, and used to spend ages on each film getting everything just right.

But now, in producer mode, he just seems interested in chucking neat ideas out there as quickly as possible. Usually for Spielberg this ain’t too bad, as he’s got enough innate talent to make these things good – if, sadly, through lack of hard labour not actually excellent. But Abrams has none of the instinct, and thus without a passion to really nail the story he’s trying to tell us, he fails.

The sloppy writing extends to many characters essentially shrugging their shoulders and going along with things. Everyone evacuates without any question even though it’s evident that the army are suspicious no-good-niks. (They also use the civil defense siren to do so, bizarrely not terrifying anyone as to an imminent soviet nuclear attack.) Every other bloke Joe’s dad talks to is dull-witted.

“Jesus, Pete, you’re really whaling on this! Was it really all that bad?”

Well no, there were good things, I’m first to admit. Abrams still really knows how to frame a shot. There’s some beautiful stuff in this. Small town America has never looked better, and his sense of location and the character of location is impeccable. There are some thrilling moments. A sort-of-battle involving the army in the town looks amazing. The film manages one truly special, magical moment with a simple scene where the kids set up for making their film at the train station. There’s a very sweet scene between Alice and Joe where he’s applying make-up to Alice – and quickly falling in love, it’s superbly played by both Elle and Joel. Ineed, Elle Fanning is pretty superb in this, despite not getting much to do character wise. She's an uncannily good young actress, I kind of wish the film had been about her instead. (But no, Spielberg always followed the lad, not the lass, so Joel's the one we're working with here.) There are good ‘hidden monster’ bits like at the gas station (Kelvin shout-out!) and during his dad’s ‘I’m the new Law in Town’ crisis management scenes the film picks up a bit of pace and interest – if being remarkably deriative still. And the train crash is genuinely amazing. Somewhat tellingly, best of all is the actual Super-8 film at the end, which is faster, funnier and cuter than the main feature.

In a way it’s the presence of the good things that makes it even more infuriating. Some of the visuals are so lush – I really want to photograph that town myself, for instance – and some of the moments so effective, that the general sloppy nature of the film and the half-hearted ‘will-this-do?’ approach to the plot makes me genuinely slightly cross.

Two talents like Abrams and Spielberg should be trying harder than this. This is nothing but a clumsy, ploddingly plotted, somewhat badly acted and, poorly scripted copy of a better batch of films. Ironic really, since that’s what the kid’s Super-8 effort itself is supposed to be.

Two out of Five

Excellent as usual, sir! But I enjoyed it a lot! Sure, it ain't a classic by a long shot, but it's the closest we've had to a proper "80s style kids sci-fi" movie in a long while. The ending was rushed and a tad shite, like.

Brilliant stuff Pete.



Very nearly lost my coffee on that line.

Well, I guess I'll be going to watch the new Planet of the Apes movie tonight then. Good review Petey.

Spot on, throughout.

Whilst some of the flaws pointed out, on reflection, are accurate, I still think it was a good film and welcome more like it.
I dont really care if its the actual quality of the film/acting/script that gets me to enjoy something, or simply the intangible goodness of nostalgia and revisiting (perhaps breifly - if you fall on Pete's side of the fence more than my more forgiving side) a time when movies were awesome.

also: hear, not here?

I think my problem is that it isn't enough to evoke a time when movies were awesome. It's a dishonest approach for a film. It has to really TRY to be awesome. And this film took so many shortcuts it failed. It was too reliant on assuming we could fill in the blanks from our knowledge of the movies it aped, which is somewhat cynical.

I really, really wanted to like this movie. It's exactly my kind of thing. I love Dante and Spielberg. But it failed. For a big screen experience this film ain't bad - I fully admit I'm being a little brutal, but it certainly is just disposable fare as it stands, and as a film that's citing and recalling great works of movie-making, that's pretty damning. I felt played, and not in a good 'in the safe hands of a storyteller' kind of way.

I forgot to mention that I admired the production side as far as the human environment element of the 70's stood. I was chuffed to see once very popular 70's sci-fi author Larry Niven on Joe's dad's shelf!

For me, it was enough. And I could fill in the blanks and didnt mind.
The more I think about it, like my post above, I can see the faults, but I think I wanted to ignore then/forgive them and just bathe in nostalgia, for right or wrong.
Ill probably try to forget reading your post too, and buy the film, and try to remain blissfully unaware.

I guess its a reflection on where films are these days. How much original IP is there? Not much. Not enough. Back to back rehashes and re-imaginations of classics. I guess I was just hoodwinked by something which (yes, I know, im talking originality on one hand then trying to praise an 80s homage/rip-off) was kinda new, but evoked the feel of something old without just relying on a brand or franchise.

Suprisingly, I actually enjoyed this and definitely feel its worth watching. Found it quite creepy in parts, too.

Really enjoyed this, mostly due to not analysing it for one second more than necessary.

Awesome train station bit which blends the spirit of the 80s movies we all love with the best visceral modern special effects completely seamlessly.

Elle Fanning is astonishing and as Pete acknowledges the town, the time, the canvas on which the mediocre plot is based are all lovely.

You're wrong on this one Pete. Super 8 was brilliant. Well it did lose it a little toward the end but still.

I'm sure everyone will instantly agree with me given my excellent track record.

I watched Super8 on an aeroplane recently. I did enjoy it, but struggle to remember too much detail now that I think back to it. Oddly, I can remember more about the Fast and Furious 5 - and that was fucking tripe.