• Movies

by Dr Chris on 12.27.11

Super 8 is the brain child of director JJ Abrams (Lost, Cloverfield) and producer Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park, ET). Back when Spielberg was making Close Encounters and ET, Abrams was using his dads camera to make 8 millimeter films on a Super 8 Camera; hence the name of the movies and why it's set during that time period. As expected it's got that family element ET had mixed with the unknown monster from Cloverfield. A boy still coming to grips with the death of his mother months helps his friends make a zombie movie. As they are filming a scene at a train station, a truck purposely collides with a train head on and tips the whole thing over, spilling and destroying the train. The creature, an alien who just wants to go home, escapes and begins trying to rebuild its spaceship.

Before long, the monster that escaped from the wreck begins wreaking havoc on the town and when the military arrives they stop at nothing to get it back. While our hero Joe (newcomer Joel Courtney) learns the truth of his mother’s death, his misunderstanding father (Kyle Chandler from Friday Night Lights) and his first crush Alice (Elle Fanning, younger sister of Dakota Fanning), get wrapped up in the monster and the armies rampage all over their small town. Super 8 has the great sense to not focus on just the monster but rather focusing on the kids and how they deal with it. It’s through their eyes, just as it was in ET through Eliot and his brother and sister. Personally, I have to consider this one of the best movies of the year.

The blu-ray is full of bonus materials, deconstructing the train scene, creating the monster, casting auditions for the kids, JJ Abrams and Steven Spielberg talk about their love of Super 8 films, and how they originally met. 14 deleted scenes (some of which should have been put back into the movie) and a commentary with Abrams in which, during the commentary, Abrams calls Spielberg on the phone and asks him why he doesn't do commentary for his films. Super 8 is a movie to watch again and again; it never gets old and will hold up to the test of time like other great sci-fi monster classics.