Super 8: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Hollywood movies are in trouble.

Just like the cliche of the graying middle ager with the beer belly who regales his bored listeners with tales of his former high school glories as a football superstar, so now we have, with J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 the celluloid equivalent of the wash up living on faded memories of yesterday. Indeed, most of the movies being made nowadays, from superhero movies to the average sci-fi flick, are living off of cannibalized images, themes and stories from the golden era of the 1970s and 1980s when Hollywood movies were actually achieving something that had never been done before.

But, just as in the Archaean epoch of the earth’s ancient geological past, when life could be synthesized autopoietically from a prebiotic soup only because the chemical and geological and atmospheric conditions were right, whereas now that those particular conditions no longer exist, the earth is not capable of spontaneous generation, so too, in Hollywood, the times have changed such that a Spielberg, or a Lucas, even a James Cameron can no longer emerge from an industry that has become stiff and brittle with formulaic repetition. Filmmakers, these days, have nothing to risk anymore: their visions are prefabricated, factory produced and as artificial and full of life as a McDonald’s super salad.

Super 8 is a movie that tries very hard to imitate the style of Steven Spielberg, and yet the harder it tries, the greater and more thoroughly it fails. The film is a pastiche of moments from such Spielberg classics as E.T., Poltergeist, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters of the Third Kind et. al., but none of it adds up to very much beyond a clickety-clack screenplay that goes rattling from one scene to the next with all the aesthetic comfort of riding on a freight train.

The film evokes a fake nostalgia by setting itself around 1980 and begins with the interesting premise of 12 year old kids making their own Super 8 movies, something which I myself indulged in at around the same age at around the same time. But when a freight train crashes and spills forth a monster which runs loose around the countryside, we spend half the movie waiting for the story to get off the ground, and when it does, it is no longer of interest to the viewer. There are a lot of scenes that fumble one after the other in an arbitrary sequence that reveals a less than self-assured screenwriting hand. The music attempts to evoke those great John Williams scores of the early Spielberg, but fails by being too obvious. And the monster, when it finally does appear before the yawning viewer, looks just like the aliens out of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and thus shows a complete failure of imagination (those aliens were not, themselves, particularly imaginative in the first place).

In a way, the film attempts to crash War of the Worlds into E.T., since the monster starts out eating people but then, as the story unfolds, we find out that he really just wants to build a spaceship like E.T. and leave the earth and get back to his own world. Thus, the scary creature running around devouring everyone turns out to be the victim, not the aggressor. The Bad Guy is really Not Too Bad of a Guy if he you get to know him well enough. The villain, as Slavoj Zizek has somewhere remarked, is just someone whose story you’ve never heard.

Thus, what begins as an ostensibly scary monster movie turns out to be a politically correct understanding of the situation from the monster’s point of view. The terrorist, it turns out, is not a terrorist after all: he just wants his home back.

What Jaws, Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park all had in common, as Zizek also points out, is the scenario of a missing or lapsed father who must make up for his parental lapse of authority by rescuing the Family from a Monster, whether the monsters are Nazis or dinosaurs makes no particular difference. In this case, the formula is exactly the same, with the exception that the absent Father never does show up to make good on his lapses. The film, in fact, is full of absent, missing, dead, or uninterested fathers who have no idea how to connect with their children who, meanwhile, just as in E.T., are busy creating a private microverse of their own as an attempt to recpature and miniaturize the missing mythological dimension from a banal, prosaic and consumeristically-obsessed society.

Thus, whereas the parents want to see monsters and enact the myth of the Dragon Slayer in order to save civilization from destruction, it is the children who take sides with the monster and give him a valid role to play in their miniature cosmology as the Friendly Being From Another World who brings a sense of the numinous that has been stolen from their lives by the mess that has been made out of the world by their boring, bill-paying parents.

So, I understand, and even sympathize with some of the film’s points, but the fact of the matter is that it is based upon a ho-hum and not very original screenplay with a film built around a not terribly exciting or imaginative monster. Hollywood, these days, is too cut off from the world of avant-garde European art — unlike the days of Ridley Scott who, with his Alien employed the abyssal recesses of  H.R. Giger’s demon-haunted Swiss imagination – to come up with imaginative or original monsters. Instead, the old styrofoam and rubber costume is brought out from the studio backlot each time a monster is called for, and as a result, I find myself, as a movie goer, ever more and more reticent to shell out twenty bucks to see a Hollywood special effects movie. Skyline, Clash of the Titans, Pandorum, Battle For Los Angeles et. al.: one crappy styrofoam packaged movie after the next.

Hollywood, it appears, is void of imagination, wit, originality or Vision of any kind. It has become, I am afraid, exactly what Adorno had accused the Culture Industry of being all along: fast mental food for the masses, served up in electronic feed lots to disenable their neurons and render them passive enough not to object to the slow erosion of their civil liberties and the imperialistic wars going on around the globe in order to get them more oil so they can continue a fat, complacent suburban existence a little while longer, while 4 billion of the world’s population languish in poverty.

I, for one, refuse to pay twenty bucks to see another Hollywood movie that I’ve already seen before.