In this review The Goonies will be mentioned frequently. That’s because the new film Super 8 from director J.J. Abrams yearns to be a certain 1985 film about colorful kids who get in trouble and ultimately save the day.
It’s the summer of ’79 and a group of middle school boys are working on shooting their own zombie film. Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) a boy who recently lost his mother is a young effects makeup wizard. His cohorts have varying skills that range from being bossy to having a fixation with explosives. Needing a little bit of drama, they decide to get a girl involved, enter Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning). Seeking to up the production value the kids try filming at a train station, but suddenly a pickup truck smashes into a train and the carnage greatly alters their plans.
Turns out the man behind the truck was seeking to free something very special that was aboard the train. How either managed to survive the crash goes unexplored along with a great deal of other necessities to delivering a concise story. Sure the military arrives on the scene and starts bossing around the local townspeople… that whole bit.
The visual effects are sometimes rushed, but usually effective. Abrams invokes his trademark lens flair wherever possible, even if that means blue glare swallowing the eyes of the talent. Frankly, it’s easy to poke fun at the aesthetic but more often than not I like the look of it. It’s also easy to see that this cadre of kid actors is pretty darn good. Complete newcomer Courtney does a fine job, though he may be playing himself for all we know. Fanning lives up to the standard of her surname. Though The Goonies had kids with a little more dimension, the supporting of units of Super 8 tend to steal scenes.
Amazingly, the script for Super 8 wouldn’t cut mustard in a classroom. Aside from the kidnapping of Alice, the boys have nothing to do with the focal action of the film. They are witnesses—like the old Nike slogan for LeBron “King” James—to the train wreck that kicks off the inciting incident, and even in freeing Alice they do nothing to change the outcome of events since we already knew that that the creature had planned this from day one. If not for the actions of the Goonies, a pirate ship would not have been seen sailing away from the cove nor a family of criminals arrested.
With Steven Spielberg on as a producer, Super 8 carries the same stigma of The Goonies as being to some degree a Spielberg film. Maybe that makes it something less of a rip-off and more comfortably an approved homage to his catalog of work. The arguing kids at the dinner table: E.T. The Extraterrestrial & Close Encounters of the Third Kind (with dead on framing). A killer creature that goes unseen for the near duration of the movie: Jaws. Heck, I was hoping the kids would befriend the poor guy. It’s unfortunate that the characters make for stronger ingredients than the recipes calls for, still I can’t say that most films have that much going for them, especially these days. ***
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