Nostalgia is defined as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.” One thing that is abundantly clear while watching Super 8 is that writer/director J.J. Abrams’ nostalgia for his early teenaged years—an era defined by the films of Steven Spielberg (also a producer here)—is shared by many of his audience members, including yours truly. The cinematic love letter—absolutely earnest, devoid of cynicism and refreshingly irony-free—manages to tap into a naive hope and adventurous optimism that the master himself, Spielberg, has, lamentably, abandoned in our post-9/11 world. Super 8 never veers into parody, but always manages, despite a series of late-in-the-game stumbles, to deliver superb action, comedy, coming-of-age pathos and just plain fun. Prepare to feel like a kid again.

Standing in for Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams are Charles (Riley Griffiths) and Joe (Joel Courtney), middle schoolers in 1979 Lillian, Ohio, who, along with Cary (Ryan Lee), Preston (Zach Mills) and Martin (Gabriel Basso), are making a zombie movie with a Super 8 camera. When Charles decides that his film lacks proper character development, he convinces Alice (Elle Fanning) to join their gang. One night, while filming a scene at the train station, a truck swerves onto the tracks and straight into an oncoming train. The train derails in spectacular fashion, nearly killing the kids and releasing something monstrous that had been caged in one of the train cars. Overnight, the military seizes control of the crash site, even as Lillian’s deputy sheriff and Joe’s widower father, Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler), is confronted with a series of baffling, unexplainable incidents. As the kids carry on with their movie making, nearly invisible to the adults around them, the quiet working-class community of Lillian is gradually turned upside down.

Super 8 is a shameless homage to the ‘80s films of yesteryear such as E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Goonies and Stand by Me. Despite being made three decades on, Abrams captures the tone, look and feel of the aforementioned films almost perfectly, even opting for a sort of screwball bedlam that was so prevalent at the time. Inevitably the question will arise—is Super 8, like a Tarantino film, greater than the sum of its homages, or, like a Tarantino film, is it little more than a formulaic pastiche, a perfectly crafted, utterly unoriginal copy? I suppose how you answer that question depends on whether or not you liked the film and identified with the material.

Excise the more spectacular science fiction elements from Super 8 and you are left with something of an autobiography. Much of the story is based on Abrams’ own childhood, which was spent making Super 8 monster movies exactly like those the young protagonists undertake (Note: be sure to sit through the credits). To the ‘80s Spielbergian model (complete with the familiar trope of the single, emotionally absent parent, prepubescent loneliness, a yearning to belong, childhood friendships and first love), Abrams has added a modern sense of dread, gleefully mixing a bit of science fiction with a bit of horror and stepping back to see what results from the combustion.

Throughout the film, the young Charles delightfully intones, “Production values!” The phrase, delivered like some sort of mantra, is a wink from Abrams to the audience, who executes some of the most extravagant thrills of the summer, including a dazzling train crash sure to clinch an Academy Award nomination for sound effects. Abrams wisely takes a page from Spielberg’s own Jaws, giving us only teasing glimpses of the creature that escaped the train wreck, revealing it fully only in the film’s final minutes.

What Abrams, and so few other summer blockbuster directors, understand is that no matter how spectacular and special effect-ridden your film is, audiences won’t care a whit unless they are emotionally invested in multidimensional characters. That a summer blockbuster is almost exclusively helmed by a cast of unknown, first-time child actors is, frankly, astonishing. But it is precisely because the film boasts largely unrecognizable faces that it works so well. The boys’ naturalistic bickering and horseplay is certain to remind you of your own adolescence or at the very least the movies you enjoyed during it. While Joe and Riley’s on again/off again relationship is handled with acute complexity, the most rewarding pairing is the budding romance between Joe and Alice. Fanning is simply spectacular, a young actress of remarkable range, complexity and empathetic gravity. Some of the film’s best parts come not during the fabulous action scenes, but during the quiet moments such as when we are allowed to witness Joe putting on Alice’s makeup or watching her perform for the first time. Courtney transmits a tenderness and adolescent longing to which everyone in the audience older than 13 can instantly relate.

I had nothing but love for Super 8 until it entered its final, anarchic act. There the film began to resemble the book we see briefly in Deputy Lamb’s office: Leon Uris’ “Armageddon.” The end of Super 8 is a bombastic mess, separating the very protagonists that heretofore allowed the film to sing, and assaulting the senses rather than informing them. It is, of course, spectacularly well done and is undeniably moving. There are some wonderful moments about the need to move on with life despite pain and the necessity of letting go—literally in this case—of the past. Yet despite the complete chaos, the conclusion somehow felt anti-climactic, a blunt and barbaric cinematic shock-and-awe campaign when what had come before it had been handled with the precision of a surgical SEAL team strike.

Anyone who watched J.J. Abrams’ celebrated television series Lost for any amount of time knows that much of the show’s allure was due to its enigmatic nature, its propensity to embed mysterious tidbits throughout the series as tantalizing clues to decipher some greater meta-message. Anyone who followed the series to its emotionally satisfying but pragmatically abysmal conclusion also knows that Abrams has made a habit of leading his viewers on. He is a habitual tease with no intention at all of ever putting out. Super 8 operates in exactly the same manner as other projects emanating from Abrams’ pen, providing incontrovertible proof that the blisteringly creative powerhouse—for he is clearly that—is an extraordinarily talented yet woefully lazy writer, who is more interested in dazzling and distracting his audiences with narrative information that seems important at the beginning but which he has no intention of resolving in the end. (Spoilers: Why was the Air Force moving the alien? Why did all the dogs flee town? Why was the alien collecting metal? Why was it kidnapping townspeople and depositing them in its subterranean lair? These are but a few of Super 8’s glaringly unanswered questions.) In isolation, one oversight might be forgivable, but the preponderance of Abrams’ remarkable ambivalence and purposeful disregard, both for his material and his fans, can no longer go unchallenged. Either he deleted latter scenes, which illuminated these mysteries—an odd move since they are, or appear to be, central to the plot—or he never planned on answering them to begin with.

That Super 8 still manages to work is testament not only to its splendid production values, creative direction, fine, believable young actors, and soaring Michael Giacchino score, but also to the fact that it has heart and passion to spare. Just as we are willing to forgive the faults we find as adults in the films we adored as children, so too are we predisposed, thanks to its shocking reflective ability to resemble those very films, to absolve Super 8 of many of its numerous faults.

© Copyright 2011 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by J.J. Abrams
Starring: Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, Riley Griffiths, Kyle Chandler, Ryan Lee, Zach Mills, Gabriel Basso, Ron Eldard, Noah Emmerich, Jessica Tuck, Joel McKinnon Miller, AJ Michalka, David Gallagher, Britt Flatmo, Jade Griffiths, Dan Castellaneta, Bruce Greenwood, Dale Dickey, Glynn Turman, Richard T. Jones, Jack Axelrod
Rated PG for violence, language and some drug use.
Running Time: 114 minutes