Super 8 Movie Review [4/5]

Review by The New Yorker

At first, this is a blissful charmer—a fable soaked in gently ironic nostalgia. In 1979, in a small Ohio town, a bunch of middle-school kids are making a terrific homemade zombie movie. The portly director, Charles (Riley Griffiths), as driven in his perfectionism as Hitchcock, gets an excitable shrimpy kid with braces, Cary (Ryan Lee), one of the undead, to take a bullet and fall down, while Charles’s best friend, Joe (Joel Courtney), applies ghoulish makeup to the film’s leading lady, Alice (Elle Fanning), a tomboy beauty. The kids are so obsessed with making their fantastic fiction that they don’t notice the uncanny things happening all around them—dogs and people disappearing, objects flying though the air like projectiles. The director, J. J. Abrams, working with his mentor, Steven Spielberg, who produced the film, creates images that have a full-bodied zest reminiscent of Spielberg’s early work. But, as the movie goes on, it suffers from digital madness: a train derailment becomes Armageddon; a giant, spiderlike creature turns up, and it’s much like other movie monsters. The magic fades into conventional spectacle, though we get to see the kids’ movie at the end, made without the millions of digits that manage, in their indiscriminate plenitude, to weaken the rest of the film.

Review by detroitnews.com

Super indeed.

There’s so much that’s right about “Super 8,” the riveting, coming-of-age, sci-fi, adventure, buddy, young love, conspiracy-driven, innocence-in-America action film from director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg that it’s hard to find anything bad to say about the movie.

Then again, it’s hard to say anything at all, since most of the film’s storylines and major conflicts have been kept under tight wraps for months. Trailers for the film tell next to nothing about it, and that’s as it should be.

Better to trot out the movie’s obvious influences, which include about every decent thing Spielberg himself presided over in the ’70s and ’80s — “E.T.,” “Close Encounters,” even “Poltergeist” and “Goonies.”

Toss in a healthy measure of Rob Reiner’s bonding classic “Stand by Me” and passing winks at “WarGames,” “Independence Day,” “Gremlins” and even “Duel,” and you’ve got one grand mash of a movie that’s trying to capture the innocence and energy of an earlier time while bringing it into the right here and now.

Not that the here and now is actually here and now. In keeping with the suburban nostalgia theme, “Super 8″ takes place in the late, pre-video camera ’70s and follows a bunch of dorks — not unlike the young Spielberg and later Abrams — who like to make amateur movies on Super 8 film cameras.

The auteur is Charles (Riley Griffiths), who’s directing (what else?) a romantic zombie story, using adolescent kids from around his small town. But the film’s star is Joe (Joel Courtney), son of the town’s recently widowed deputy sheriff (Kyle Chandler) and in charge of make-up and models.

Review by Reelviews

Super 8 is an homage by its writer/director, J.J. Abrams, to its producer, Steven Spielberg. It’s also a love letter to all those with a passion for filmmaking that emerges at a young age. Super 8 is the kind of high-profile movie we so rarely see these days: an original story (not a sequel, spin-off, re-boot, or adaptation) in 2-D. The special effects are state-of-the-art (would anyone expect anything different from an Abrams/Spielberg collaboration?) but are not used gratuitously. Unlike many science fiction features, this one puts the characters before the monsters and the big bangs. Abrams remembers the simple rule that a majority of his contemporaries have forgotten: action and mayhem have meaning only when an audience cares about the people trapped within the maelstrom.

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