J.J. Abrams' Super 8 (2011)

[Sxottlan]

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Seemed like a fade.

]

Okay.

I like that we eventually saw the entire short film. Warehouse 47 is definitely a Star Trek reference.

[TGM]

I expected it to be good, but god damn, not that good!

[Fezzik]

I really liked this. The kids, in particular, were really good. I liked that they talked like kids instead of little adults.

And hey, who knew Elle was the better actor of the Fanning sisters?

It recalls so many earlier films, and not all of them Speilberg. Yes, there were clear calls outs to Close Encounters, E.T. and Jurassic Park but it also felt, at times, like a live action Iron Giant.

Not perfect, but a really nice shot in the arm. Good show by J.J., though I do admit that he's going a little overboard with the teaser shots of his monsters and the whole "Its quiet, nothing's happening at all here--BAM! surprise monster!" scenes.

[Sxottlan]

My friend and former co-worker played the girl filing the police report about her missing sister with the hair rollers.

I had actually completely forgotten she had a little role in this until she reminded me tonight, so I might see it again for her scene. But there's a lot out now that I want to see.

[transmogrifier]

My main beefs with the film:
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- why have the most interesting character (Elle Fanning's) disappear for most of the last third?
- the random distruction of the town by the army was over-the-top and a cheap ploy to add a sense of danger. Not to mention poorly staged and edited.
- going overboard with the physical danger the kids are in and having them escape with almost nothing but a scratch (except when it is convenient to narrow down the number of kids as the climax approaches). The train crash is so over-the-top that their lack of injury becomes a nagging distraction in the subconcious
- Noah Emmerich's character. A complete and utter waste of time and energy. He adds nothing.
- Doing the quiet-quieter-silent-BOO shit over and over
- Why waste time having the kids go to the evacuation center just to come back again when they don't learn anything they couldn't have learnt anywhere else AND their escape is so damn boring? (a guy in a car drives them out!)
- botching the reveal of the creature on the video. Should have happened about 30 minutes sooner, and before the audience had seen it.

]

The more I think about it, the shoddier the whole story seems.

[Henry Gale]

Yeah, pretty great, but not really the amazingly perfect, summer movie standard-setting final product that I and probably anyone else that loved the trailer and whatnot had inflated its potential in our imaginations to be leading up to its release.

I think at the very core of it, I kinda disagree with the idea Abrams and Spielberg had about JJ's original basic premise (Stand By Me-ish story with a Super 8 camera, boy loses mother, all the kids experience life-defining changes and growth throughout a summer) that it suddenly took an alien crashing near the movie-making kids' hometown to make it an engaging story. Even though the non-horror elements seem like they could've been done before, it's the way it's they're layed out here, with the amount of heart, conviction and raw details given about the lives these people lead, that makes it as great and effective as it is here. If anything, the strongest, most emotionally engrossing stuff in it is the string of scenes dealing explicitly with Joe and his father, and also him and Alice. The bits where Joe and his friends have serious, high-tempered arguments about the filming of their movie, geek out about their zombie make-up, and explain to one another what makes a story compelling and scary, those are ones that find the most of the movie's fun, often in the simplest ways cinematically (even if some of that feels a bit self-aware early on). The monster aspects just seem in there to push its marketability into the 3,000 theatres needed to keep a nice profile in the big June release calender, while essentially telling the same fully-realized family story at its core. It helps that those scenes captured very tensely and entertainingly, but it sometimes feels the most predictable, almost like a more polished take on Cloverfield's creature-on-the-loose drama, just with a different setting and storytelling technique.

Either way, this is still a reaction and subsequent frantic herding of thoughts about a movie I'd look at as a solid 8.5, but that I'm also irrationally disappointed wasn't closer to a perfect 10. Still, the best mainstream movie of the summer, and possibly even the year, so far.

[Watashi]

I had no idea Bruce Greenwood played the alien. That's awesome.

[Rowland]

A thoughtful conversation about the film by two of the writers for The L Magazine.

[Henry Gale]

I had no idea Bruce Greenwood played the alien. That's awesome.

Oh wow, this is Colm Feore in Thor all over again. I wonder if every big summer movie from here on out has a great Canadian actor hidden in plain sight as a villain of sorts. I guess Victor Garber in Kung Fu Panda 2 and Michael Ironside in X-Men could count for this as well.

[Pop Trash]

Echo most of what has been said already. This is Steven Spielberg: The Movie through and through. It's also as good of a time of spot-the-reference as the Kill Bill movies but easier since all the references are from one, very mainstream director. I even noticed two shots that were nods to Raiders.

The ending did go a little schmultz-overboard (which in itself is very 'berg) and everything seemed to be wrapped up pretty fast. But between this and Star Trek, Abrams sure knows how to make a movie just move, and string scenes and set pieces together with grace, humor, and entertainment. He even had less lens flares this time, but they seemed to work in the context of this better than Trek (they often came up when the camera was pointed upwards towards the sky, as if the lens flares were UFOs themselves).

Like Trek, however, the film doesn't leave much of an after-affect that would lead it to great movie status. As entertaining and well made as it is, it doesn't leave you with that haunted feeling like say, Spielberg's own great A.I..

I'm also concerned Abrams and his Bad Robot protege Matt Reeves, don't have a whole lot of originality going on. Beyond the homages, and the ability to put together films that shouldn't work but do, what are the themes and styles of Abrams/Reeves?

[Henry Gale]

I'm also concerned Abrams and his Bad Robot protege Matt Reeves, don't have a whole lot of originality going on. Beyond the homages, and the ability to put together films that shouldn't work but do, what are the themes and styles of Abrams/Reeves?

It's hard for me to pin down either of them in those sort of terms, especially since they only have a half-dozen films between them (with two being installments in existing franchises and another being a remake), and also since a significant amount of the things I love under Abrams' name are from his work in television.

And even in just that field, if we were to just look at the broad strokes in the storytelling of Alias, Lost, Fringe, or even Felicity and Undercovers, they're all about ordinary families caught up in extraordinary circumstances with new relationships being formed in the process, characters coming of age at any age, the balance of personal and professional life, exploring the ability to make peace with the past while simutaneously taking control of one's future / destiny, and um... lots of characters named Jack thrown in for good measure. Elements of all of those have all found their way into Abrams' films so far, and though they may not be the most original ideas to mine for great dramatic storytelling, I feel like the groundwork of his stories are always injected with enough unique slices of life and believable emotion to make up for whatever lack of reinvention he may set out to accomplish with the genres he tackles. And whether or not you may think the stories and characters are efficiently told and developed, they're always the things that are front and centre as the main task at hand, and the biggest priority for the action to occur as a result of, instead of the other way around.

So for someone to have output as consistent as his, and to see it exist at such a level of success (and arguably even influence), he remains one of the more exciting people for me to look forward to new projects from. I am, however, still waiting for him to make a truly fantastic film.

[Dukefrukem]

Best original screenplay

[Dukefrukem]

I haven't read any of the comments above me.

This movie was timeless Spielberg...from Abrams. At least it felt like that to me. The first 3/4 was near perfect for me on an emotional, immerse-able and entertainment level. I loved the kids, loved the individual personalities, the tone of the movie was made apparent from the start... I was hooked.

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The only REAL problem for me to accept was the damage in the train crash. I think this will be a common complaint among moviegoers, but how fast does Abrams expect me to believe the train was going? And the station gets completely demolished but leaves the camera and car completely intact? (except for the broken lens of course)

Where the movie starts to unravel is when the neighborhood was under attack. From that point on I felt like I was in an episode of Lost. Too many thoughts rumbling around in Abrams's head to put on the screen at once. Too many questions left unanswered. Why were the hostages not conscious? And a slap wakes them up? Too obvious the people freed would be food for the monster during the escape. Too obvious the monster would confront one of the kids and leave them unharmed. (unless you're gonna accept the fact that the monster can read human thoughts too and could understand why he was approached, but then that asks the question why the monster would eat a young middle school girl) And how did the magnetism pick and choose which objects to take and which to leave? If the whole store blasts out the windows, why didn't the Jeep get thrown up in the air too? And the rest of the soldiers guns?

]

So the end comes up a bit short, but i don't care. I was sucked in up until the scene I mentioned. I dug it.

[Dukefrukem]

This movie is good, not great. Abrams' direction is fine, but I wish the script was a lot stronger and more to the point. I wish Abrams wasn't so restrained into making Steven Spielberg: The Movie, because if anything, the stuff without the alien are the best parts of the movie.

This is it. This sums it up.

[Mysterious Dude]

I think I'm starting to figure out this Abrams guy, after seeing Cloverfield, Star Trek and Super 8 (though not have seen one whole episode of any of his television shows). They're all fun, action-packed, fast-paced, and there's nothing particularly huge that's wrong with any of them, but they all feel very slight in the end. There's certainly a place for this kind of entertainment, but I wonder if Abrams is capable of doing better.

[Dukefrukem]

I think I'm starting to figure out this Abrams guy, after seeing Cloverfield, Star Trek and Super 8 (though not have seen one whole episode of any of his television shows). They're all fun, action-packed, fast-paced, and there's nothing particularly huge that's wrong with any of them, but they all feel very slight in the end. There's certainly a place for this kind of entertainment, but I wonder if Abrams is capable of doing better.

I'd say probably not. Which is a shame considering he is has the Emmerich-like touch of build in his films, but as you said, they never end up panning out. He's a marketing genius. Gets people in the seats (for the most part) and leaves them still hungry for more. It's like he gets bored in the middle of writing it and tries to slop the 2nd half together.

[Irish]

There's certainly a place for this kind of entertainment, but I wonder if Abrams is capable of doing better.

I don't know about capable, exactly, but it seems to me that he's just not interested in anything beyond high concept entertainments.

One of the touchstones of Abrams is his command of structure. Everything he's done has been incredibly well structured from start to finish. It's also been almost entirely shallow. (I'd love it if this guy produced something by Tarantino and Burton, guys who have big imaginations and larger than life characters but who have almost been entirely weak in the structures of their movies).

There's nothing wrong with high concept, but asking about Abram's capability almost seems like wondering if JK Rowling is capable of producing an Infinite Jest.

Interesting question, maybe, but also, in a certain way, the wrong one.

[Pop Trash]

(I'd love it if this guy produced something by Tarantino and Burton, guys who have big imaginations and larger than life characters but who have almost been entirely weak in the structures of their movies).

WTF?

[transmogrifier]

Best original screenplay

Hell no. The screenplay is the worst part. It's a Frankenstein-esque mish-mash of scenes that are borrowed from a million different sources and never gel together. Any movie that spends so much time on the waste of a character that is Noah Emmerich's cannot have a good screenplay.

[Winston*]

Hell no. The screenplay is the worst part. It's a Frankenstein-esque mish-mash of scenes that are borrowed from a million different sources and never gel together.

Thank you. Finding this thread very surprising, wouldn't have expected so many people to like this movie.

[Dukefrukem]

Hell no. The screenplay is the worst part. It's a Frankenstein-esque mish-mash of scenes that are borrowed from a million different sources and never gel together. Any movie that spends so much time on the waste of a character that is Noah Emmerich's cannot have a good screenplay.

Should have put a smiliey. It was kind of a joke because I did the same thing last year after having seen Inception so early in the year.

[Ezee E]

I think the posters that won't like this movie haven't watched it yet.

[Dukefrukem]

I think the posters that won't like this movie haven't watched it yet.

That would be:

8, Babydoll, irish, soitgoes, trans would be on the list but he is already confirmed to have hated it.

[Pop Trash]

That would be:

8, Babydoll, irish, soitgoes, trans would be on the list but he is already confirmed to have hated it.

Spinal could go either way (our most unpredictable M.C.-er IMO) but I'm going to say 'yay.' Raiders will probably like it.

[Pop Trash]

Also, between this and Somewhere, Elle Fanning is kind of owning. Please don't get sucked into the bullshit Hollywood world of cocaine/crappy rom-coms Elle (e.g. the careers of Lohan/Kate Hudson).