I really disliked this movie, or rather, while not actively offending me it managed to not appeal to me in any way. I'm beginning to accept that J. J. Abrams, talented as he is, does not have a cinematic vision -- he has a television understanding of drama. Which is fine when you're making movie versions of Mission: Impossible and Star Trek but doesn't really help when you try to do something like this. The whole thing's assembled like a frenzied LOST season, with character "arcs" and "beats" and all those tricks that keep you watching a show episode to episode, like cards tacked onto a bulletin board.
The only thing that frustrates me (external to the movie) is everyone's comparisons to Spielberg. I've read these quotes where people say, "It's just like Spielberg's classic sci-fi movies from the Seventies!" First of all, there's only one "classic sci-fi Spielberg movie from the Seventies," and I just happened to have watched it on Blu-ray about a month ago: it's called Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Super 8 is NOTHING like it...it's like comparing Face/Off to Heat. Close Encounters (besides being brilliantly made) is lyrical and soulful and will have you crying at the end, nearly as much as E.T.. The universe gets bigger in your mind as you watch. Super 8 is a dull viewing experience that "hits its marks" with leaden, thumping obviousness and leaves you wondering what the point was and why they bothered in the first place; it's only goal seems to be, well, to superficialy reproduce the style and rhythms of an old Spielberg movie with no understanding of why those movies were so revolutionary.
So, not recommended, but it's disquieting that people actually can't tell the difference between this and the real stuff. Or maybe they can, and it's just a few gullible reviewers...I don't know.
P.S. I have to plug my new website again, which, as I mentioned below, has a blog (!) which I've been happily adding to but which already has all my Horrorthon posts (with all comments!), including all my Horrorthon reviews (with all comments!) in a searchable archive, as well as lots of other stuff that I've been adding to daily. Comments welcome...
7 comments:
Huh. We saw this recently and really enjoyed it. Yeah, it's not epic and certainly no E.T. or Close Encounters, but I wasn't expecting it to be.
Maybe it has to do with my empathy for a movie where a kid loses his Mom and it makes the emotions work. Or the fact that I tend not to make lots of analyses between films, but take them more at face value.
Has anyone else seen it?
I have to agree with you, Jordan, I didn't like this movie at all. I think I'm finally at an age where I don't care about the problems of tweens. I though the train crash was done fairly well but the climax was too silly for me.
It wasn't a problem of "analysis"...I just wasn't having any fun. The movie was dull and lifeless (despite its frantic overplotting) and all the character stuff (parental relationships etc.) seemed tacked-on or phoned in, with a couple of lines of dialogue serving to show family estrangement and reconciliation with absolutely no real feeling beneath.
Also, with the title and all (and the 1970s setting, which I assumed was chosen to force the characters to deal with super 8 film without recourse to cell phone cameras, video cameras etc.), I thought that the accidental film they shot would be important (like, the whole point) the way that the accidentally-shot film is so suspensefully crucial in Blow-Up or Blow-Out or anything else from back then when people suddenly realize they've got something on film...but it needs to be processed/doesn't have sound etc. But in Super 8, there's nothing! Their movie (and the accidental filming of the crash) are completely unimportant to the plot. Given the movie's title, I thought that their roll of 8mm film would be, you know, the whole point!
Fanning's performance was excellent, but she was the only interesting part of the movie for me. As you note, the "super 8" element had noting to do with the film (except in the closing credits for humor). It's not that it was a bad film, it just didn't do anything for me. Comparisons to Spielberg are absurd.
Spoilers ahead, but they're a ways down...
I can kinda see both sides of this. After I saw this I was telling people that this was cheesy, but my kind of cheesy (see my sister's comment about empathy for a kid who loses his Mom).
However, while I enjoyed it okay, there were only two real standout elements to Super 8. One being the train crash, which was excellent, and the other being the bittersweet crush that the main kid had on Elle Fanning's character. He's so happy when she takes the candy from him in the car, and the couple of scenes with him doing her makeup are adorable. Unfortunately, by the time their thing was really going it wasn't nearly as subtle.
I had the same reaction as Jordan to the ultimate irrelevance of their footage. The big moment comes when everyone's packed in a makeshift refugee camp -- how the hell do you find a super 8 projector in that mess?
Despite "my kind of cheesy," I was honked off when the mom's necklace turned into the last piece of the spaceship. I mean, really? There were bikes visible on the ground behind them in those shots, totally unaaffected by the magnetism.
The big reveal about what Elle's dad had to do with the mom's death was a study in anticlimax. For half the movie you're gearing up to find out how he drunkenly dropped a load of I-beams on top of her and it turns out he was sick that day? That's the big duh-duh-DUH? Weeaak.
I wonder if people are glomming Jaws together with Close Encounters. Spielberg, 70s, but not sci-fi. Regardless, the comparison is superficial at best.
My two cents. I wouldn't call it terrible, but I wouldn't recommend it either.
We found it mildly enjoyable but extremely cheesy. Tony and I weren't really impressed and wouldn't recommend it either.
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