I can’t vouch for the particulars of the marketing budget, but it does seem that Super 8 is getting a more aggressive rollout on home video than even most summer popcorn movies. I’ve seen ads in a couple of different mediums and the marketing has been unusually aggressive in the you-must-own-this-movie-because-it’s-a-classic variety. The DVD cover image even goes so far as to have two typically asinine critic quotes on it, the second of which sets the oxymoron to 11 by declaring it “An Instant Classic” (capitalization in the original).
While I’m loath to hold the marketing of a movie against it, the “instant classic” in this case is no mere coincidence or decision by low level home video people. Ever since Super 8 came out last summer, it’s been billed as a movie that will transport audiences back to the heady days when Steven Spielberg made nothing but great movies, and the film itself rolls around in that selling point like a pig in shit. Unfortunately, Super 8, while a decent enough popcorn flick, misses that mark wildly.
The movie was written and directed by Hollywood darling J.J. Abrams as an open love note to the truly classic lot of 1980s kids movies that came out in the years after Super 8’s 1979 setting. There are elements of everything from The Goonies and The Monster Squad to Explorers and even Flight of the Navigator. Lurking over everything though is the immense, bulbous headed shadow of Spielberg’s genre defining smash E.T..
Like E.T., Super 8 involves a group of plucky American kids who accidentally encounter an alien. Also like E.T., Super 8’s real bad guys are the government agents who are bent on exploiting the alien for their own purposes. Unlike E.T., Super 8 suffers from two crippling problems that will prevent anyone from caring about it long term.
The first problem is easier to explain but no less damaging for being so: the alien couldn’t be more generic. For most of the movie it’s an amorphous blob of dark computer graphics. Then at the end it is revealed to be a standard screen alien that’s a vaguely reptilian, vaguely insect looking collection of limbs and leathery skin. It lacks even a single distinguishing characteristic and is in every way an unremarkable digitally generated movie monster.
It’s so forgettable that could be the computer generated alien from a dozen other films and so closely resembles the monster from Cloverfield (which Abrams produced) that the average movie goer probably couldn’t tell them apart in a lineup. This is a stunning failure for a movie so directly aimed at nostalgia. Goonies has Sloth and the pirate ship, The Explorers has the tit-a-whirl, and E.T. has, well, E.T. Each one of them is iconic and memorable in a way that any movie geek can recognize on a t-shirt even twenty-five years later. Super 8’s creature is nothing like that; the movie doesn’t even have a defining image. There’s nothing like Elliot riding his bike in front of the moon, or even something as simple as the Truffle Shuffle or “Hey you guys!”.
The second problem is that Abrams is making a movie for adults rather than a movie for kids. That may seem like a minor point, but many of the movie’s shortcomings stem from this crucial flaw. Today’s adults love those 80s kids movies because they saw those movies when they were kids. Most people born before about 1975 don’t share Abrams’ (b. 1966) love of these films because they were already past the target demographic when the films were released. You almost have to see those movies as a kid to fall in love with them the way Abrams wants people to fall in love with Super 8, but Super 8 isn’t endearingly simple and childishly earnest the way his source material is.
Instead, Super 8 is every inch the sophisticated modern summer movie: ironic, self aware, violent and much scarier than the average 1980s PG rated movie. It attempts to simulate childish wonder and give adults who were kids in the 1970s and 1980s the same thrill they got from seeing the originals for the first time, but it feels like the replica that it is because it’s clearly aimed at the adults those kids grew up to be rather than the children they once were.
This misaimed focus is apparent in basically every aspect of the movie. There’s the slightly too mature love story, where, despite their teenage fumbling, our two leads have the weary apprehension of dating scarred adults. There’s the knowing self awareness of the various members of the kid group, the fat kid understands his role as well as the nerd and the pyromaniac. The lead even has an intuitive grasp that he’s going to have to bond with his father sooner or later.
The most damaging expression of this is simply the setting of the film. Abrams has made a period piece, different only from a 19th century or 1950s costume drama in the specifics of the hair and the clothes. To the ten-year-olds who should’ve been his target audience, 1979 is as far removed as 1959 or 1859. One of the big reasons E.T. and all those other 1980s movies are still beloved today is that the kids watching them when they came out identified with them. Elliott and others like him were ordinary kids who acted like much of the audience, but for someone born post-2000, Super 8 is more like watching a slideshow of your parents’ childhood.
Super 8 isn’t a bad movie, but neither is it a memorable one. The alien is just another video game creature and the movie is just another big budget summer flick. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but since Super 8 tries consciously and so very hard to be an iconic classic, one can’t help but walk away feeling a little disappointed.
