Super 8 | Film review

The early films of Steven Spielberg aren’t so deeply entrenched in the imaginations of moviegoers because of their scope, their characters or even their gee-whiz technical wonders. It’s their inflation of the personal into the universal—the way that Spielberg, in his desire to simultaneously thrill the masses and tackle his own hang-ups, built blockbusters from the wreckage of his troubled childhood. In Super 8, a ’70s-set tribute to those early summer movies, Lost mastermind Abrams uncannily mimics the look, the feel and even the broken-home pathology of Close Encounters and E.T. What’s missing, even with Spielberg himself in the producer’s chair, is the sense that all this nostalgia means much to anyone involved.

Like E.T.’s Elliott, our preteen hero (Courtney) is coping with parental absence—in this case, the loss of his mother to a factory accident. Although his police-deputy dad (Chandler) wants to ship him off to baseball camp for the summer, the boy’s happy shooting monster movies with his friends and making eyes with a pretty ingenue (Fanning). Up late one night, the kids accidentally film a spectacular train wreck, one that unleashes (spoiler!) an extraterrestrial menace upon the quiet community.

The less seen of this lumbering, Cloverfieldian CGI critter, the better. (It gives you new appreciation for how Spielberg worked around a malfunctioning animatronic shark in Jaws.) Abrams, meanwhile, goes down the Amblin Entertainment checklist—kids on bikes, fathers and sons, mysterious G-men—with the same slickness that fueled the “Beam me up” in-jokes in his Star Trek reboot. A deeply cynical act of apery, Super 8 establishes Abrams as a skillful cover artist. What he can’t fake is the childlike wonder that underlies even the shoddiest Spielberg dream machine. To paraphrase the man’s best film, he’s gonna need a bigger heart.