Small Town, Big Happening

There’s a new dream team in Hollywood that’s beginning to deliver fantastic things for us to enjoy, which is just swell if you ask me, especially when you think about how this summer’s movie schedule is crowded with prequels and sequels and fifthquels and everything in between.

Produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by J.J. Abrams, Super 8 will do for adventure what Bridesmaids did for comedy: it will become the season’s most satisfying offering of its genre.

By teaming up with a film legend like Spielberg, who’s clearly one of his heroes, and paying homage to the man at the same time, Abrams has delivered a coming-of-age story set against the thrills of sci-fi that may not be, say, 100 percent original, but totally works. Theirs is a most-welcome collaboration that borrows the best elements of the former’s seminal oeuvre – chiefly Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T. – to great effect. As a result, Super 8 is exciting, fun, and heartfelt.

In other words, totally worth your hard-earned cash.

Starring an impressive group of newcomers (the most famous of whom would have to be the oh-so-lovely Elle Fanning) and Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler, the movie is set in the blue-collar town of Lillian, Ohio, in the summer of ’79.

A bunch of boys – led by budding filmmaker Charles (Riley Griffiths) who makes movies on his Super-8 cam, and his BFF Joe (Joel Courtney) – are running around all over town, mostly sneaking out at night, making a zombie movie they hope to enter in a local festival.

It’s during one of their production shoots on the outskirts of Lillian that their lives will be forever changed. There’s a catastrophic train crash, y’ see – but that crash that may not have been an accident at all.

The kids capture the incident, but it isn’t until later that they realize exactly what they’ve documented. That train had sensitive, dangerous cargo on board...and that cargo has escaped.

Soon enough, Joel & Co. are at the center of a government conspiracy to keep the residents of Lillian in the dark as military personnel work overtime to recapture whatever it is that has gotten out. At the same time, they are grappling with their feelings. Joel lost his mother four months earlier; his father (Chandler), the town’s deputy, is a ball of grief and keeping his distance from his son; and an older girl (Fanning) with whom Joel has a poignant connection is challenging the strength of his friendship with Charles.

Lots going on in Super 8, huh.

You’ve got a little horror, lots of humor (Abrams, who also wrote the script, captures not only the essence of the era but its joys as well), and plenty of heart to go around and make you a little nostalgic. If you remember the summer these characters live in, then you’ll appreciate how detailed the movie is, and if you don’t, well...then I’m sure it’ll make you yearn for a time when imagination ruled Tinseltown because they don’t make ’em like this anymore.

Sure, the movie is a little uneven at times: as nuanced as it is in some aspects (the acting comes to mind) its desire to pay tribute hinders its footing at times, arresting its own development a little (kudos for all the Easter eggs, though...an Abrams-esque touch through and through, alright).

Nevertheless, I hope this only the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Spielberg and Abrams because they make one heckuva partnership.

My Rating ***1/2

Photo: Paramount Pictures.