15 Years Ago, A Spielberg-Style Alien Movie Did Everything Right Except the Alien Parts
J.J. Abrams' Super 8, which turns 15 the week of Disclosure Day's release, captures only part of producer Steven Spielberg's magic.
Steven Spielberg knows aliens. Though he hasn't made as many UFO-centric movies as you might assume (he's made more movies about WWII than he has about extraterrestrials), the director behind Close Encounters and E.T. clearly knows how to tell a captivating tale about visitors from other worlds. He's doing it again this weekend with Disclosure Day, a movie that happens to come out just a few days after the 15th anniversary of another alien movie, one Spielberg produced but did not direct. Even so, Spielberg's fingerprints are all over J.J. Abrams' 2011 film Super 8, a movie about a visitor from another world. The surprise is that the alien parts of this movie, which are explicitly a homage to '80s Amblin films and Spielberg's alien heyday, are by far the weakest parts of what's otherwise an incredibly rewarding coming-of-age tale.
Set in Ohio in 1979, Super 8 follows 14-year-old Joe (Joel Courtney), whose mother has just died in a freak industrial accident at work. Joe is mourning his mother and trying to make it through with his father, Jack, the local sheriff, played by Kyle Chandler. Jack isn't a bad dad, exactly; he loves his son, but he's struggling as a father during this difficult time. Luckily, Joe has a bunch of close friends led by Charles (Riley Griffiths), a would-be film director with big goals and plenty of confidence. Charles gets Joe and three other friends to make a zombie movie with his Super 8mm camera. When he realizes that the picture needs a romance angle to go along with the (pretty good!) DIY zombie effects, Charles reaches out to Alice. Played by Elle Fanning in one of her breakout leading roles, Alice is surprisingly game to go along with Charles' attempts to be Orson Welles, and she and Joe start getting close. Their relationship is complicated, though, by the fact that Joe's mom died when she went to work on a day off to cover for Alice's father, her co-worker, who was too hungover to make it to the plant.
That premise is more than enough for a full movie, and it is an absolute joy to watch these scrappy kids work together to make a zombie movie, titled "The Case." One of the friends, Martin (Gabriel Basso), plays the lead, a detective who goes to investigate a series of strange disappearances despite the worries of his wife (Alice). Wearing a trenchcoat and tie, Martin is pretending to be a grown-up, and Charles' script is full of details of what he imagines a hardboiled detective's life and relationship might be like. Joe and his friends are making a movie about grown-ups, and in the process, they're growing up themselves. (It helps that their movie, "The Case," which is shown in full during the end credits, is actually quite charming.)
Super 8 is not just a movie about these kids making a movie, however. While filming a scene at a train station late at night, the group witnesses a spectacular train derailment—and their Super 8mm camera records the whole thing, including a glimpse of an alien creature escaping containment. They find themselves in the midst of a big conspiracy as an Air Force Colonel played by Noah Emmerich is determined to stop at nothing to recapture the alien, and the alien itself is a far cry from cuddly ol' E.T.
The alien aspects of Super 8—the part of the movie that audiences were probably most excited to see and helped the film make more than $250 at the worldwide box office—are not without excitement. The train crash that kicks things off is spectacular, and the scenes where the alien menaces this Ohio town are nice and suspenseful. (The alien is not dissimilar in appearance to the monster from Abrams Cloverfield, which came out three years earlier. The films are not connected, so your mileage may vary on whether or not the design is effective or too familiar.) But for as much as Super 8 feints at being a scarier, more intense riff on E.T., it ultimately chooses empathy. The alien is not so bad; the whole experience brings everyone together, including Joe and his dad, and we've all learned a valuable lesson about grief and letting go. It's a nice sentiment; it's just not as effective or wondrous as the real Spielberg deal. For that matter, the more action-packed parts of the movie are also not as effective as Spielberg's most tense scenes, like anything from Jurassic Park or War of the Worlds, the latter of which came out six years before Super 8. None of the genre elements of Super 8 are bad. Instead, they're a distraction from an engaging human plot. That might be a worse outcome, unfortunately.
All of Spielberg's alien movies are defined not by the extraterrestrials in them but by their humanity. You can see it in Disclosure Day, a film that uses aliens to attempt to understand what makes people tick and how we've let society get to where it's gotten. So it makes sense that Super 8, a movie deliberately in the style of Spielberg, would have such a strong, earnestly moving human element. Joe, Alice, and Charles alone are more than enough to make Super 8 worthwhile—one might even go so far as to say they're better characters than anybody in Disclosure Day, which is an ambitious and well-intentioned film that's also more than a bit messy. If you are looking to scratch that perfect '80s Amblin itch that perfectly balances genre and heart, you might be better off going back to the genuine classics. At least we will always have "The Case."
