I have long considered Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial the bookends of my childhood.
The former arrived at the beginning, the same year as Star Wars, and opened my eyes to the magical possibilities of movies. The latter came at the end, closing out an extraordinary five-year period that included such films as Superman, The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
All were highly imaginative, extremely influential tales that not only fostered my love of storytelling but lit the fuse for what would become a lifelong passion for cinema. I revisit these films more than any others and am always on the lookout for new ones that recapture that special time and place, that sense of awe and wonder.
J.J. Abrams' new film Super 8, a nostalgia-drenched tale of movie-loving kids tracking a creature terrorizing their small Ohio town, is a throwback to those iconic films of the late '70s and early '80s, a long-lost first cousin of both Close Encounters and E.T. No surprise really, as one S. Spielberg is a producer.
Appropriately set in 1979, Super 8 follows a handful of junior-high-age friends, newly paroled from school for the summer, as they try and finish their homemade zombie movie in time for a fast-approaching film festival. Charles (Riley Griffiths) is the film's pudgy writer and director; his best friend Joe (Joel Courtney), still reeling from the loss of his mother the previous winter, handles the make-up; mouthy Cary (Ryan Lee, channeling a young Jack Earl Haley) is a borderline pyromaniac and of course is in charge of effects; Alice (Elle Fanning), the lone girl of the group, is the lead actress and the object of both Charles' and Joe's affection.
Late one night while filming a scene at the local train station, the group watches in shock as a pick-up truck intentionally hops the track and plows headfirst into an oncoming freight train. The ensuing derailment and explosion scatters boxcars and debris for miles, including thousands of odd, multi-tiered cubes, one of which Joe quickly pockets. Amid the wreckage they find the pick-up's battered driver, the junior high's science teacher Dr. Woodward (Glen Turman, who also played the ill-fated science teacher in the Spielberg-produced Gremlins); Woodward, while pointing a gun at their heads, tells them to run and forget what they saw.
The train turns out to be a mysterious military transport under the command of taciturn Air Force Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich); soon hundreds of soldiers have descended on the site, retrieving the strange cubes and searching for something that appears to be missing.
It not long before that something begins wrecking havoc on the town: dozens of dogs are reported missing; whole engine blocks are being stripped from neighborhood cars; people, including the sheriff, are just up and vanishing; and if that wasn't enough, all those cubes begin making a beeline for the downtown water tower.
While Joe's sheriff's deputy father (Kyle Chandler) begins his own investigation, the kids begin to realize the answers just may be on that roll of film they shot that fateful night.
Steven Spielberg calls Super 8 J.J. Abrams' first real film (his previous features include reboots of the Mission: Impossible and Star Trek franchises); Actually, this is J.J. Abrams' first Steven Spielberg film. Everything - the pacing, photography, the us-against-the-government storyline - is a blatant homage to Spielberg's classic alien-contact films. There are scenes that are exact duplicates of ones found in Close Encounters and E.T. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I sat there giddy as a kid watching a movie that easily could have been a missing 1979 middle act.
And while the comparison to those two films will undoubtedly be the focus, it shouldn't overshadow Abrams' talent as a filmmaker. His command of story, expert direction of a young cast and ability to dazzle an audience visually may remind us of a certain bespectacled, bearded gentleman, but they are the inherent traits of a born craftsman, one that will undoubtedly enchant moviegoers for decades to come.
Super 8 returns that special sense of awe and wonder to the screen, recapturing a time and innocence that anyone who remembers falling in love with movies can relate to.
