Before the beginning, movie theatres weren't packed megaplexes with overpriced popcorn and overcrowding. They were a place you would go to beat the heat for a few hours and hang out with your friends. Sadly, those days have passed. As a matter of fact, the ballooning costs of movies coupling it with 3-D and unimaginative remakes and reboots, people are just outright not turning up in theatres anymore. This is a very sad fact. The last movie I saw that truly encapsulated the kind of time I would have at the movies was Grindhouse. It had vibe to it that I can't relate to you. A feeling of nostalgia swooshing over you as you have a blast enjoying the kind of movie that seemingly died out with the dinosaurs. Super 8 is that movie and I have a review of it coming up. Super 8 tells the story of Joe Lamb, a teenaged aficionado of model trains and horror movie make-up living in a small Ohio town. He learned his technique from the godfather himself Dick Smith. We begin the film with the death of his mother, we don't see this death because it would be unnecessary.

Instead, it becomes that quiet thing we don't talk about. His father, Jack, is the deputy sheriff and he is letting his grief overwhelm him. He's lost and doesn't know how to cope. He suggests sending Joe to baseball camp simply because it's what kids do over the summer, not frittering away on pointless movie-making. Joe wants to be there for his father and help him but he wants to spend his summer hanging out with his buddies and making zombie movies. Joe's interest is peaked when he discovers that the girl of his dreams, Alice Dainard, has taken the starring role in the film. Joe's wowed by her presence, his buddies are wowed by her acting. They begin shooting a rather important scene at a train station when a train begins to rush by, they rush with fervored excitement to shoot the scene with the sounds of the train because of the "mint production value," when Joe notices a truck barreling towards the front of the train, it smashes headlong into it...then it all begins. The evil, evil military show up and try hunting for a creature accidentally set loose on this bucolic little burg.

There are a couple of massive set pieces in the film that I'd like to discuss. First things first, the train crash. The shrapnel bursting through the air, continuous explosions and train cars flying through the air at an unspeakable velocity, it truly is hard to find the words to describe this momentous occasion within the film without just straight up saying, WOW! It's a pretty thrilling set piece for a film that up until that point has been very low-key. You really feel the explosions and I bet you anything that seeing this scene in IMAX will be unforgettable. Its awe inspiring in the way that it must have felt to see Star Wars for the first time ever. Later in the film the kids are being detained by the military in a bus and the creature attacks. Again, another thrilling set piece that has its fair share of jump scares as the kids try and escape as this monster picks off the soldiers one by one.

The kids work together well, they all have a great rapport with each other, you truly believe that would be friends in real life. The performances aren't forced at all and the humor is either. It could have been unfunny to have a bunch of wise-cracking kids but it feels like they transplanted the kids in from The Goonies, just a group of lovable good-natured rapscallions. They ride their bikes back and forth from their houses, they live in the same neighborhood and eat dinner over each other's houses. They rib each other and call each other names. It truly feels like my childhood. Charles, the director of the film has "Halloween" and "Dawn of the Dead" posters on the wall. He has issues of Creepy and Famous Monsters of Filmland strewn about his room. he writes the script constantly adding new lines right up until they shoot. He is the bigger kid but they never play him to be the stereotypical fat kid and for that I'm thankful. Martin is the leading man in the film and we unfortunately don't see much of him but he does provide some relief in some fairly tense scenes by tossing out some classic one-liners. Cary, is however the comic relief, he plays the one zombie (despite dying several times on camera) throughout the entirety of the Super 8 short and his obsession with explosives is a running gag played for full effect.

I wanted to take a moment to discuss Alice and Joe's relationship and the relationships of their parents. Louis, Alice's father, is indirectly responsible for the death of Joe's mom and Jack's wife. Louis shows up at her wake early on the film drunk out of his mind. Jack locks him up and throws away the key. He doesn't want Alice hanging around Joe and neither does Louis. To Ron Eldard's point, he could've played Louis out to be this drunk, abusive man, an unlikeable cretin. But he doesn't. He plays it like anyone really would; he's a sad man, probably replaying the events in his head thinking about how he could change what had happened. That moved me in a way you can't imagine. It broke a cliché that most dramas would pander to. Same goes for Kyle Chandler, his role is a more important one. After the disappearance of the sheriff, his role is to get pushed around the military and field questions from insane citizens who claim that the problem is Communists. Kyle Chandler plays the father figure role to the tee, he has that sense of authority while at the same time being reticent to speak. the best scene in the film to me is when Jack and Louis are in the car and they haven't ever spoken about the accident and Eldard is sobbing and apologizing for what he's done and Chandler just says, "It was an accident." Just a very subtle scene of closure and lesser films would have had a big fight scene with the two guys screaming like lunatics but the scene is very low-key and played out beautifully.

Abrams' script does what it needs to… it highlights the emotion of the families and the conflicts that result out of that. The adults get the more dramatic element of the script while the kids play out the more comedic element but ever so often the two paths cross and they both play the sides excellently. His direction is crisp and clean which is a staunch juxtaposition to Spielberg's earlier work like "The Sugarland Express" and "E.T." Of course, he has his patented lens flares throughout the feature but I personally didn't notice a Slusho reference anywhere. Maybe I will upon second viewing. Micheal Giacchino's score evokes the earliest of John Willams' scores and I've loved Giacchino's work since the beginnings of Lost. For Felicity fans, Amanda Foreman and Greg Grunberg make quick cameo appearances as well, Foreman as a newscaster and Grunberg as a sitcom actor.

All in all, it's a great film that will evoke many feelings out of you, if you were a child of the 70's or the 80's or even an adult. You will get this movie.

By the way, stay through the end credits, the entire 8mm zombie film, "The Case," will play almost all the way to the end. It pays homage to zombie greats like Romero and it resembles some of Sam Raimi's early stuff like "Within the Woods." Even better, the kids wrote and directed the short film themselves.

I’m personally glad that this movie was not released in 3-D amidst all these other blockbusters, IMAX on the other hand in essential for viewing the film. Super 8 is a literal summer movie, not in that it’s a film with a crazy amount of special effects geared towards getting asses in seats and smiles on faces. It’s a movie about summer.

And I can’t fault it for that.

Nathan Smith gives Super 8 an "A" and it releases on June 10th.

Written and Directed by J.J Abrams
Released by Paramount Pictures
Run time : 112 minutes

Joel Courtney - Joe Lamb
Ryan Lee - Cary
Riley Griffiths - Charles
Gabriel Basso - Martin
Kyle Chandler - Jack Lamb
Ron Eldard - Louis Dainard
Elle Fanning - Alice Dainard


Visit www.super8-movie.com