My Husband was more eager to see “Super 8” than I was, but I still went with him to see it on the big screen last night. He’s a big fan of J.J. Abrams (who wrote and directed this film) and Steven Spielberg (the Executive Producer), and while I’ve nothing against them, I don’t tend to go to see movies unless the previews looked really good, and I didn’t think that the trailer for “Super 8” was really all that fantastic. Well, we went to see the film anyway, and it wasn’t as bad as I expected.
This film is primarily about Joe Lamb, who lives in Lillian, Ohio. The movie opens with Joe sitting on a swing outside of his house in the cold daylight of winter. Inside the house are many dressed-up people from the town discussing the horrible accident that Joe’s mother was just in which took her life. Many express their concerns to one another about whether Joe’s father, police Deputy Lamb, will be able to take care of Joe on his own; he’s never had to be much of a father before, they state.
Joe’s friends, all middle-school age like Joe, aren’t very good at expressing their condolences for Joe’s loss, and instead focus on continuing to work on making their zombie movie for the Ohio “Super 8” Film Festival. Charles, the ring-leader of the group of friends, is the director and writer of the film they’re working on, entitled, “The Case.” Charles is bossy and highly unlikable, but he and Joe have been friends since Kindergarten, so Joe seems unable to see that Charles is a pretty big douche. Charles decides that at midnight after the wake for Joe’s mother, that all of them will sneak out to the local train-station and work on the film a bit more. So they do.
At midnight, the group of boys all meet up and are picked up by the “cool girl,” Alice, who is too young to be driving, but who stole her father’s car in order to do so. The lot of them head over to the train station and begin preparing to shoot the film. Charles gets quite excited when, in the middle of the rehearsal, a train begins to go by the station. “Production value,” he shouts, and everyone rushes to put film in the camera, get costumes on, and get into place in order to shoot the film with a real train going by in the background. As the train begins to rush past them, only Joe notices the white truck that’s traveling down the tracks in order to meet the train head-on. He barely has time to shout a warning before the truck and the train collide in an explosive crash, derailing the train and causing many of the train cars to shoot into the air. Absolute chaos reins and the boys and Alice run for their lives, barely able to dodge the hail of fire, metal and anything else that’s raining down from the explosions.
Joe is the first one we see after all begins to calm, and he is staring at a train car that’s making an awful lot of noise. Something within the car is slamming around, trying to get out. Unfortunately, there’s no time for the boys to investigate because the military begins to arrive and they have to get out of there before they’re noticed. Joe has just enough time to grab a strange, white block from the wreckage to take with him before he and his friends jump back into the stolen car and speed away, barely escaping before the military’s arrival.
After the train wreck, some weird things start to happen. The military begins to occupy the town. Dogs begin to go missing. Car engines, microwaves, electrical wires and other electrical things are disappearing. People start disappearing. The town of Lillian, Ohio is out of power for days. It becomes clear that whatever was inside the train car got out, and it doesn’t seem as though anyone knows what it is or how to stop it.
When this movie began, I started to get into it. The scene with the train/truck collision was awesome, probably one of the best crash scenes I’ve ever witnessed on the big screen. After that point, though, I really lost most of my interest in the film. It took forever for anything interesting to happen after that, and when it did, it was pretty suck-tastic. The acting was all fantastic and the special effects were great, but the plot sucked. If it weren’t for the occasional bits of comic relief in the film, I would probably have walked out. I didn’t really care what happened after a certain point, because there wasn’t much to care about, so I was pretty much just waiting (in vain) for the next big thing to happen.
I don’t think that I have any interest in ever seeing this movie again, and I don’t think it was worth it to see it in the theater.
Best part: Train/truck collision
Worst part: Plot
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