This blog is currently almost entirely written in response to and in tandem with my good buddy Sam Wieland's blog rageagainstthejachine.blogspot.com (check it out) whose Super 8 review can be read here.  In it, my esteemed colleague invites those who were not captivated by J.J. Abrams' latest spectacle to 'reconsider their lives' and the possibility that their intelligence has left their brains permanently.


In short, Super 8 is worth seeing, but I'm still trying to figure out if I liked it.  This isn't meant to be a review so much as a collection of thoughts and comments that, hopefully, someone can come along in the comments section or shoot me an email and help me sort out my thoughts because, I'm riding a very strange fence.


Just to get it out of the way:  Super 8 is good fun.  You simply cannot take a chainsaw to this movie, much as a few smarmy New York critics may try.  It's too clear just how much fun Abrams had making this film and how lovingly he reconstructs his own influences to call it crap (though I have mad respect for and tend to agree with the latter sneerer more often than not, he too often turns film reviews into a debate about consumerism, then picks the wrong sides.  Exposing the inherent merchandising value of such a loved studio as Pixar is worth reading, but siding with Michael Bay and his transformational androids to do it betrays a first-rate mind gone culturally senile).  Between these two extremes, I'll err on the side of my esteemed friend and colleague, Mr. Wieland, but it will indeed be an error until I can figure out just what the devil is going on with this movie.


Will spoilers follow?  Heck yes they will.  But it's for a good cause.


There's something fishy about Super 8.  You can feel it from the very beginning.  It's like all the pieces are in place but you're being led down a very different path then you thought you were.  Everyone is content to call it a love letter to Spielberg, and that it may be but there's just a lot more going on with this movie that I don't think anybody's talking about.  Firstly, Super 8 looks like a Speilberg movie, but it doesn't feel like a Spielberg movie.  The setpieces are all there.  Kids with overly rambunctious siblings and cluttered rooms packed with mementos, estranged family situations, kids on bikes, young love, a mysterious monster with dubious motives.  There are several scenes that work to match Speilbergian tension and succeed pretty well:  The train crash sequence, the convenience store abductions, the man in the electric truck, the kids on the bus. These are masterfully filmed scenes that hearken back successfully to the old school blockbusters that Abrams fed on as a child, but it's the time in between and, taking a step back, the film as a whole that induces more than a little head-scratching.


But there's one quality that's noticeably absent here:  the thing.  In many of Spielberg's best films, especially Close Encounters, E.T. or even Jaws, the drama of the movie is the very thing everybody is there to see:  namely, a monster.  Spielberg was an absolute master at weighing the film's central draw (a movie about mysterious aliens, a movie about friendly aliens, a movie about a killer shark etc.) with meaning and narrative power.  The thing is the film's central concept and all its drama flowed from that.  The thrilling thing about watching Close Encounters is that there are aliens (!) and they're gonna abduct people (!).  In Jaws, it's that there's a shark (!) and it's gonna eat people (!).  E.T. there's an alien (!) and it's gonna love people (!).  The thing itself, the film's central conceit is at the dead center of the drama.  You're excited, sad, scared or laughing because of the thing and how the characters are reacting to that thing.  


Super 8 flies over and around the thing, never spending near enough time on it to make it fascinating.  The monster seems like almost an afterthought at times.  It provides some good thrills and chills with a few great, almost standalone sequences but it's clear that Abrams' focus is not on the thrill of seeing a monster rampage secretly through an Ohio town.  It's hard to pin down the perspective of this movie.  The film does not play out through the eyes of any one character but all in all, its perspective is a free floating entity, directing the viewers' eyes here and there with little care taken to build up the mystery and intensity of the supernatural.  We're slung between sweet character drama, childish tomfoolery, government conspiracy and sweeping, heavily soundtracked bike-riding shots at such a bumpy rhythm that threatens to derail the film's focus.  The pacing is so ADD that it's easy to forget that there's a monster lurking around.  The thing is lost in the shuffle.  Super 8 is drama with a monster in it, rather than drama centered around a monster.  


Perhaps Abrams is prejudging modern audiences' boredom.  Have we seen so many monsters and government conspiracies by now that surely, focusing all of a film's attention on it will bore people to death?  No.  Say what you will about M. Night Shyamalan but he is (or was) the true inheritor of the Spielbergian thing.  He could build his films up to a fever pitch and make you fear a cheap special effect like it was right there in the room with you (watch Signs and don't give me no lip about it; pearls before swine, my friends.  Yeah you heard me).  


Super 8 lacks this focus.  This is most evident in the treatment of the government conspiracy.  The U.S. Air Force (which I don't think has ever been so vilified.  The army?  Sure.  The Marines?  Assholes.  But the Air Force?  That's new).  Anyway, the vast government conspiracy is treated surprisingly flaccidly.  It's understood that a bunch of G.I. Joes trooping around town mean ill toward everybody that we like and are only out for their own selfish motives.  A cryptic warning from a dying martyr is left untouched until a particularly dull scene toward the end in which the kids break into their school and discover everything they need to know about the monster in less than five minutes.  The cool thing about conspiracies is that they unravel over time, looming in the backdrop, connecting clues here and there until you finally have the shocking truth.  In Super 8, the kids just don't think to investigate until the jig is up anyway and by then you already know the doughboys are up to no good.  For a guy whose viral marketing is the stuff of legend, Abrams shows precious little subtlety in opening his own mystery box.  There's no startling revelations here.  The monster's arrival and government cover up are set up, left to dry for a good hour and then cleared up in all of five minutes.  It's just bad pacing.  (Incidentally, the macguffin in the film, Joe's locket, is a similar letdown.  It's a picture of him and his mom.  Duh.  Why build up to something we've already guessed?)


Super 8 is a particularly bad love letter to Spielberg.  Abrams fails in his tributes by losing the thing to the incidentals.


OR maybe it's focused on something else.

When a film's perspective is this crooked, then there's another conclusion to be considered:  maybe, just maybe there's more going on here than meets the eye.  What if Abrams is trying to really say something about the thing instead of just worshiping it or recreating it.  It's highly likely that Super 8 is a well concealed statement about....something in the guise of a loud and fast summer movie with an old school vibe.  Putting theme before story often results in inorganic pacing (just watch Terrence Mallick) and Super 8 is just this kind of off-kilter.  There are enough expertly directed scenes to just cover it over with a layer of well-crafted summer fun, and being so up front about its influences could be the perfect red herring, dangling it in front of the sophomoric thinking moviegoers to make them think they've got a handle on the subtext, when in fact, the real fish is still out there in the water.  


Just what Abrams is trying to say escapes me.  Actually, I just flat out don't know.  That's where you come in.  So I'm just going to lay out the parts of this movie that contribute to my hypothesis that Abrams is saying something really deep about...something here.  Films?  Hollywood?  America?  What is it?  If you think I'm splitting hairs and should just sit down, masticate my popcorn and quit thinking about it, then do me the favor of reading on before blowing it off and buying your next tickets to Green Lantern.


1.  It's clear that Super 8 is a movie about movies.  The film-within-a-film the kids are making pays homage to the Spielberg/Lucas/Coppola/Cameron school of high concept directors who started out that way, but it's significant, thematically speaking, that these kids are making a movie when the action begins.  Much of the dialogue relates to movies and movie making.  The fat kid director, Charles (played brilliantly by Riley Griffiths) is always talking about making his film and the rest of the kids play along.  The result is that phrases like "production value" and "getting in character" are worked into the script.  Keep that in mind moving forward.


2.  The interactions and dialogue between Charles and Joe are particularly heavy.  Their relationship could be the dead center of the film's thematic narrative.  Consider:  


Charles:  Are you gonna be okay without me?


Joe:  Yeah.


Is it possible that each kid in the posse represents a different director in the school?  Is Charles supposed to be George Lucas, a control freak who cares more about production value than real drama (note the "I love you too" easter egg as he's coaching Martin on his lines)?  So then who is Joe?  Spielberg?  The name Joseph Lamb does seem to be a stark Jewish juxtaposition with Charles Kaznyk (Read George Lucas/Steven Spielberg).  Or perhaps they are the dueling interior ambitions of any real fimmaker:  Charles = ambition and Joe = wonder?  Joe lovingly paints models while Charles wants to blow them up.  Here the Alice/Joe dialogue is telling:


Alice:  Don't let Charles blow up your train.


Joe:  Why not?


Alice:  He shouldn't get what he wants all the time.


Is this sly commentary on the state of film special effects and production values?  


3.  The cubes.  Continuing in the film commentary, the little cubes littered around town by the train crash are also very instructive.  Eventually, they all come together to form the alien's spacecraft.  That's when it hit me:  the cubes are polygons.  Polygons are the three dimensional cubes that computer animators use to make the amazing CG images we enjoy in films.  This appears to be a perfect 1 to 1 metaphor.  The magic cubes build the alien's ship at the top of the water tower.  Keep in mind that Joe is a model maker.  His line at the end is instructive:


Joe:  He's building a model.


Is Abrams making a sly statement about the structure of movie props?  A reconciliation between old school techniques (Joe's model making) and the digital age (the creature and its spaceship)?  Does all the trashed and scrapped metal of the train crash represent the breakdown of the physicality  (particularly regarding film production) on the eve of the digital age?  That we make models with magic cubes now whereas we used to do it the hard way?


This all depends on...


4.  What the creature represents:  Wonder?  Imagination?  Infinite possibility? Hope?  Potential?  The thing?  Abrams himself has been very vocal about his fascination with mystery, and in that light this theory doesn't look to be too far off the mark (if a little esoteric).  The trick of hiding the monster's physical form does lend itself to the theme of mystery, though it's undercut by how Abram's pedantic treatment of his thing (though objectification is necessary for making a statement rather than painting a loving portrait.  If this is what Abrams is doing in Super 8, then I'd say it's justified).  


So then what does the Air Force represent?  Critics?  All those LOST fans who were entranced by the show's mystery but then angered when the show the last episodes weren't exactly a 'tell-all'?  Sounds good to me.  Taking it a step further, Nelec and his men are the forces of objectivity trying in vain to recapture imagination and vivisect it, make it profitable and work for their own concrete aims.  Perhaps Abrams (Joe) and his incarnated 'mystery box' (though certainly not a tame creature) are the ones fighting against the common enemy of marketers, producers, critics and all the evil hosts of the modern entertainment industry.  By this read, it's not newfangled CG effects or 3D glasses that have caged and harried everything that's wonderful about movies, it's those who would manipulate them to turn profit as well as generational misunderstanding represented by Joe's father.


So then who's the good guys?  Artists (Joe), actors (Martin & Alice), directors (Charles, though not without a little slap on the wrist), stuntmen (Cary).  As discussed earlier, computer generated effects come under Abrams' blessing.  


Joe:  We know bad things happen.  But you can still live.


Generational squabbles (Joe's estrangement from his father, the 'old school' unable to accept the 'new school') and the sharks of industry have sent imagination on the run, but the clear eyes and full hearts (can't lose!) of children will set it free again.  Despite the efforts of the jaded, imagination will blast off again and live free.


Or maybe all this is totally bogus.  Either way, I still feel like Abrams' own inability to sit back and relish his creation (specifically his creature) does a little too much to undermine his message.  Things just move a little too fast, tension starts and stops a little too much, the characters' back stories too various and multiple to be really affecting.  The emotions aren't thick enough, the creature is creepy but not nearly as haunting as Spielberg's mystery lights in Close Encounters.  In that movie also, the the forces of complacency work to sully the visions of those captured by mystery, but this message never comes at the expense of the thing itself.  If the above is on the mark, I'd say Super 8 is a really good commentary, but not a love letter.  It uses the Spielbergian/Lucasian/Cameronian/Coppolian ethos to make a much needed claim about the state of imagination in the 21st Century, but without paying proper homage to the thing, it will only ever be a secondhand statement.  If this was Abrams' sole intent all along, then I proclaim the man a genius.  But is it possible to do both?  Comment and construct?  Create wonder and also talk about it at the same time?  Turn off the lights, queue up Close Encounters and be blissfully enlightened.  As far as Abrams' career is concerned, isn't LOST already as faithful a reincarnation of Spielbergian wonder as one needs?  Queue that up too while you're at it.