Super 8 (2011)

I am no fan of J.J. Abrams. Lost is about ninety-five hours of bullshit, and his Star Trek movies are just typical action movies with a Star Trek gloss, like those old color televisions that just consisted of putting plastic wrap type material over them. But Super 8 is less an Abrams movie than it is a Spielberg one; it harkens back to the Spielberg of yore, before he started taking himself too seriously, the one who brought us movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Super 8 follows a pack of Goonie-esque adolescents who love making their own no-budget movies. One night while filming a scene for a zombie movie they are working on, their biology teacher drives himself into an oncoming train causing a massive explosion. Soon the military has moved in on their idyllic small town to clean up and look for... something. What is impressive about Super 8 is how well-drawn its teenage protagonists are drawn. They are refreshingly devoid of the usual juvenile potty humor that comes with the territory, act, shockingly, like real middle schoolers. The relationships portrayed are convincing, and evoke genuine pathos, despite falling into the usual Spielberg sentimentality trap. What works so well about Super 8 is how it balances its portrait of adolescence with heart-pounding science fiction. The conspiracy angle evokes the best of The X-Files mythology, and the choice of sinister military men as the antagonists resonates especially in the post-9/11 age. Less impressive is the big reveal, the actual alien itself. Clearly a product of Abrams, the alien looks like something out of a video game, and suffers from a disappointingly uninspired design. The climax of the film is also less-than-stellar, and lacks the magic of the preceding sequences. Super 8, however, is a highly enjoyable ride, and easily one of the best blockbusters of the past few years.