The Thousands

Film spectatorship can be so impoverished these days – a downloaded .avi file on a lounge-room flatscreen. But Super 8 is all about old-school movie magic. Having regarded its pre-release hype with Cloverfield-fuelled suspicion, I was surprised and delighted to feel all over again the mystery of ET, the scares and quips of The Goonies and the bittersweetness of Stand By Me.

Summer, 1979. Recently devastated by his beloved mum’s death, Joe (Joel Courtney) is helping his friend Charles (Riley Griffiths) make a Super 8 zombie movie, against the wishes of his cop dad (Kyle Chandler). The kid filmmakers witness a spectacular midnight train crash during which something escapes, then weird shit’s happening around town and the military steps in. Meanwhile, Joe’s falling for Alice (a wonderful Elle Fanning), star of Charles’s film.

Director JJ Abrams’s monster feels like a McGuffin; the SF thrills and looming government conspiracies are a backdrop for small interpersonal dramas. I also loved Abrams’s sly metacommentary on genre filmmaking (stay for the credits to see Charles’s movie!). Fear of aliens is a metaphor for the scary threshold of adolescence; while the ending evokes Spielberg’s cornball utopianism, it also shows that growing up doesn’t necessitate getting cynical.