REVIEW: J.J. Abrams' Spielberg Homage Super 8 Is Less Than Super

While the kids are rehearsing outside some remote abandoned house, they witness a horrific, explosive train wreck, a crunching honker of an accident that goes on for minutes. In the aftermath, the sooty, scared but unharmed kids discover that the train cars have spilled out a load of bumpy silvery cubes (among, possibly, other things). They flee, wisely, when Air Force goons -- led by beret-wearing tough guy Noah Emmerich -- step in to clean up and cover up.

Then the whole town goes haywire: Microwave ovens are mysteriously "stolen" from store inventory; car engines become messed-up and mangled by some unseen force; the town's pet dogs go AWOL; and citizens, from the town sheriff to a regular person wearing hair rollers, go missing. The kids keep shooting their movie, using the town's chaos as a backdrop, and in the process getting closer and closer to the secret the military is striving to cover up. The formula is classic, and potentially satisfying: The kids' investigation allows them to act like sensible grown-ups, while the real adults flail around helplessly, chalking up the weird goings-on to ridiculous things like a Soviet invasion. Meanwhile, young Joe deals almost imperceptibly with his grief. In an additional complication, it appears that Alice's father (played by a soulful Ron Eldard) may have played some role in his mother's death.

Super 8 springs from one of the great Spielberg traditions, an approach that makes kids the smartest and most sensitive people in the room. They're the ones who see that a poor, misplaced creature is just trying to return home; they're the ones who are willing to gaze up toward weird sights in the sky with more wonder than fear. Abrams gets the basics right. But he stumbles on the follow-through. For example, the missing-dog question is answered conveniently enough, but he never shows us the dogs' return home -- it doesn't occur to them that this is something the audience might want, a kind of happy closure to an unsettling situation. Instead, Abrams uses the missing dogs to get his desired effect -- then drops them. The secret mystery of the train wreck is menacing but also benign, depending on which way the wind is blowing in Abrams' head: He's caught between the angry beastie in Cloverfield and the cuddly extraterrestrial in E.T. -- he wants to harness the dramatic power of each, but he can't square exactly how that should play out dramatically.

Super 8 isn't badly crafted, and it includes some wonderful era-specific details: Abrams gives us a suburbia of banana-seater bikes and identical-looking tract homes with those stylized, elongated bricks on the bottom and clapboard above. He's unearthed some key musical relics of the era, among them "My Sharona" and, a song I hoped I'd never hear again in my or anyone else's lifetime, Alan O'Day's "Undercover Angel." There are stoner camera-store guys in Huk-a-Poo shirts. When Joe and Charles marvel over Alice's performance in a key scene of their film, they apply the ultimate superlative of the day: "She was mint!"

But the details float around too loosely in space, anchored to nothing in particular. Abrams is too much in love with the "Unsolved Mysteries" approach to story-telling. He's good at making things seem weirder and weirder. But he makes them so weird that whatever payoff he comes up with can't possibly measure up.

Even more puzzling is why Abrams would want to cast himself in the role of Spielberg's Mini-Me when he already has his own personality, his own filmmaking identity: If Mission Impossible III conflated ambition with cluttered, incoherent thinking, his Star Trek was affectionate, exuberant, inclusive. Maybe that was his real Spielberg movie.

As it is, Super 8 works hard to explore the secret and complex emotional life of children while riffing on the awe of the supernatural, and in Abrams' hands, it's an uneasy blend. The child actors he's cast are likable and believable enough: Courtney's Joe is such a low-key presence that we absorb the idea of his grief by osmosis, rather than by anything he does. And Fanning is lovely as Alice -- she has the luminous feline quality of the young Michelle Pfeiffer.

But the most glorious and assured filmmaking in Super 8 happens at the very end, as the credits begin rolling. That's when we get to see the Super 8 film made by the kids, in all its ragged, unprofessional glory. Its plotting is surprisingly sophisticated, and while there may be some glitches in the sound and the editing, they only add to the dada grandeur of this mini-masterpiece. The movie-within-a-movie of Super 8 is, in strict terms, more of an ode to George Romero than to Steven Spielberg. But its youthful brashness is pure Spielberg in spirit. Pre-Flipcam, pre-YouTube, it's a relic from a long-lost era, a time when children were not yet constrained by the tyranny of having boundless, instantaneous outlets for their creativity. Abrams' mini-movie is the most wistful film Spielberg never made.

For more about Super 8 click here for Movieline's extensive coverage.

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