It's just not reasonable to expect every day and experience to be completely unique.
Just finding a new way to set your alarm every night would be problematic — do you go with the child you paid to start screaming at 7 a.m., or the revolver with a trigger tied to a suspended bucket held beneath a slowly dripping sack? And then you get up and it's time to get dressed, but that shirt has been worn before. All of them have! Yet you can't just go naked, or with a belt with two pockets tied to it, because last month's indecent exposure citations already cost more than your groceries. Maybe a tape-vest filled in with dog fur blotted from along the baseboards?
Good luck with that, suckers. I get the shirts I like for a reason: because the hobo was too drunk to notice me peeling it off him. To me, then, it's no big thing when one movie is clearly inspired by/an homage to/in the style of an earlier movie. All that matters is whether this new one is good. For Super 8, the answer is a resounding, train-exploding yes.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Four months after the death of Joel Courtney's mother, he and his young friends are making a zombie movie together. When they sneak out to do some filming, they witness a horrific train crash. A crash that was no accident.
As Courtney begins to fall for their movie's actress Elle Fanning, strange things start happening around town: lights and electronics quit working. Dogs go missing. People, too. By the time the military rolls in, it's become clear the whole town may be in danger.
Let's just get this out of the way: Super 8 is Spielbergy. In fact, that was the very first of my notes, right before the detailed blueprints of my plan to wriggle under the seats and steal the sandals of the guy in front of me (my current newspaper-slippers can not handle these hot sidewalks). Mysterious, menacing forces; cinematography so sharp you could shave with it; a small town; kids and nostalgia and hey — J.J. Abrams — if you love Spielberg so much why don't you marry him?
I don't care. Good things are good things, and Super 8 is a good one. Writer/director Abrams' pacing is impeccable. Between that, his interest in monsters and the supernatural, and his ability to craft legitimately scary scenes, Abrams is kind of like what M. Night Shyamalan should have become, knocking out true blockbusters full of dread, thrills, horror, and awe.
Also, Abrams seems to have a thing with actors. Specifically, a thing where he either finds or makes really great ones. This is especially hard to do with kids, who as actors tend to be as uneven as a staircase built in a hurry by a bunch of guys with one eye, but this young cast has the feel of a real group of friends, complete with occasional bickering and meanness. They're pretty dang funny, too. Also, this most recent Fanning girl — she's kind of amazing.
As are these action scenes. The train crash is a spectacle that could only be topped by a team of gorillas competing in a demolition derby where the car frames are made of unstruck matches, and only then just barely. Not only that, but the kids' reactions to it are varied and natural. They don't walk away from the explosion in slow motion with their backs turned smoking candy cigarettes. Instead, they barf on each other, scream, act bewildered.
They're relatable, which is a simple, obvious thing that is puzzlingly hard for movies to pull off. But it makes all the later derring-do in Super 8 that much more satisfying.
It can't completely hit the emotional heights it's shooting for, but that (and the Spielbergy thing, if that's a problem for you) is really Super 8's only flaw. Other than that, it's gripping, funny, scary, and kind of awesome — in the biblical sense, not in the sense you'd talk about hard-rocking robots. I haven't walked out of a theater feeling that floored and good since the first time I saw Inception.
Grade: A-
* Contact Ed Robertson at edwrobertson@gmail.com. His fiction is available on Kindle, Nook, and through Smashwords.
