The Movie
Lots of young wannabe filmmakers swiped their dads' cameras and made their own short, grainy masterpieces back in the day, perhaps inspired by the works of upstarts such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Few took that inspiration as far as J.J. Abrams, among the most successful filmmakers in recent years. For Super 8, he drew extensively upon his own experiences, then took them to science-fictional extremes.
It's summer vacation in a small Ohio town, 1979 (the year isn't spelled out but we can infer from a TV news story about Three Mile Island), and a bunch of feisty, borderline obnoxious kids are making their own amateur zombie movie. One fateful night, they are witnesses to a violent train crash, but they soon realize that it was no accident, and the cargo was anything but ordinary.
Power outages and strange disappearances begin, while a military investigation and cleanup becomes a full-scale evacuation, complete with lies and cover-ups and men in green playing by their own rules. The genre and the style call to mind Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a healthy dash of E.T. too, plus the new twist of a monster that might seem familiar to fans of LOST and Cloverfield.
Super 8 is great fun and brilliantly executed, with some clever casting and Oscar-winning composer Michael Giacchino's best impersonation of Oscar-winning composer John Williams. The scenes are packed to the rafters with accurate trappings, the characters' bedrooms looking eerily similar to mine circa the late '70s/early '80s. At some point however, nostalgia seems to have trumped originality, and at times Abrams seems to settle for little more than a salute to Spielberg (Steven was one of the producers), with the benefit of three decades of hindsight and technical progress. And as with most homages, we've seen so much of this before.
The truth is out there: Read Joe Lozito's review of Super 8, recently declassified.
The Picture
Super 8 was in actuality shot in a variety of film formats as well as on the RED One MX digital camera. I noted some pleasant film grain and a bit of video noise in this high-bitrate 2.4:1 AVC presentation, with Abrams' trademark lens flares popping up throughout. In general I found the image to be quite nuanced and natural, but while dark police uniforms can show lots of folds and texture, shadows are lifeless, oppressive, and almost gloppy in the backgrounds and on actors' heads. Very odd and very disappointing for a recent blockbuster.
The Sound
The Act I train crash, featured in almost every commercial or trailer that I saw for this movie, is the sort of scene that home theater buffs dream of, an important part of the story certainly but rendered with a conspicuous sonic panache that makes us sit up and say, "Ooo...." There's wild kinetic action directed across the entire soundstage, enormous train cars and smaller chunks of debris flying all around, punctuated by the occasional explosion. The Dolby TrueHD 7.1 track also pulls out thunderous, resonant bass whenever it needs to. Effects are phased smoothly, appropriately between channels during camera moves.
Off-screen activity is frequently placed in the surrounds to create a sense of realism both in familiar environments (a police station) or extreme situations (a neighborhood under siege), but the track also contains an abundance of subtle touches, voices and echoes and machines and more, that really serve each scene and bring the movie to life in unexpected, perhaps unnoticed ways.
For more on the soundtrack, click on over to this behind-the-scenes video interview with Super 8 sound designer and supervising sound editor Ben Burtt.
The Extras
Writer/director/producer J.J. Abrams is joined by producer Bryan Burk and director of photography Larry Fong for an above-average audio commentary. The eight featurettes--all in high-definition and Dolby Digital 5.1--total 97 minutes and together they showcase what a personal, passionate project this was for Abrams and others. There are also 14 deleted scenes, 13 minutes all told, again in HD and 5.1 audio.
"Deconstructing the Train Crash" is an elaborate interactive grid-map of Scene 24, taking us all the way from the printed words of the script to the finished scene by way of pre-production, production and post-production "tracks." There are lots of quick multimedia pods to explore, with helpful text along the bottom of the screen.
Disc One is also BD-Live-enabled. Disc Two is a hybrid DVD of the movie along with a Digital Copy for iTunes or Windows Media.
Final Thoughts
Spielberg putting his name on such an obvious tribute to his own earlier works seems like bad form, frankly, but while Super 8 is visually ambitious (albeit flawed on Blu-ray), sonically it is one of the best discs of this or any year.
Product Details
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