And the child that came out turned to be pretty good looking.
From Writer/Director JJ Abrams (the man who created “Lost” and “Alias” for the small screen and directed “Mission: Impossible III” and the 2009 reboot of “Star Trek”) and Producer Steven Spielberg (do you really need to know his resume?), the pair takes audiences not only back in time in the film’s setting but also with the type of film that it is.
While the comparisons with “ET” are inevitable, such as with this Andy Greenwald piece from Grantland that suggests it’s more of homage than a blatant rip-off.
“Super 8” is a throwback to the days where the performances and story dictated the pace of a film and not big-assed explosions and tons and tons of CGI.
The film is carried by the performances by three child actors and Kyle Chandler.
The film’s main protagonist is Joel Courtney, who plays Joe Lamb, a normal kid in a blue-collared Ohio town who quite doesn’t know what to do with himself after his mom died in a work-related accident at the town mill.
His best friend is Charles Kaznyk, played by first-time actor Rile Griffiths. Griffiths nails his role as an aspiring filmmaker, capturing the obsession that most artists have when they strive for perfection and you can feel the insecurities with his own body image (the kid is pretty chubby) and yet he still can see light at the end of the tunnel because he knows that one day he will thin out. (He even tells Joe at one point, “I know I haven’t thinned out yet but my doctors tell me it’s coming.”)
Rounding out what turns into a love triangle that really isn’t a love triangle is Elle Fanning. The younger sister of Dakota Fanning, Elle proves that acting chops are flowing fluidly in a family where the parents had been world class athletes.
Elle, like her older sister, brings a maturity to her role and gives off the aura of someone much older than the 13 that she is. Her character, is rebellious yet not out of control; young yet not naïve and has sex appeal for a 13-year-old yet without coming off slutty. She’s just a young girl who basically has to raise herself because of her alcoholic single father.
Her presence in the film provides the tension between Joe and Charles without turning it into a teenage love triangle and eventually reunites them.
While he’s the top name on the poster (other than the monster), Kyle Chandler plays a supporting role to the children but his performance should be the breakout performance his career needs and is no surprise to anybody who has watched him on “Friday Night Lights” for the past five years.
As Jackson Lamb, Chandler perfectly captures a man who has just lost his wife, really doesn’t know his teenage son and has no clue how to raise him and now has to deal with a major disaster and the hundreds of military officials that wont tell him anything.
In any big disaster movie, the co-star is always the “it.”
Abrams does a spectacular job of channeling Spielberg from “Jaws” in making the scariest part of “it” is that you cannot see “it.”
You can’t tell whether it’s the shark from “Jaws,” the Smoke Monster from “LOST” or the Rancor for “Return of the Jedi” and that’s the best part. Even in 2011, with all the advancements in GCI, a computer generated monster is never quite as scary as rustling bushes or a darting camera that just catches a glimpse of “it” as it darts away.
“Super 8” is definitely worth the time and is a more than your standard summer blockbuster popcorn flick and all I have to say to JJ Abrams is to please, start production on the next “Star Trek” film.
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