Super 8 - J. J. Abrams
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Joe Lamb and his friends are working on a zombie movie to enter an international film competition. When they're filming a scene at a train station in the midnight, Joe notices that someone is driving a truck onto railway. The truck crashes with a moving train and causes accident and massive explosion on the site. The camera is broken due to its impact but the situation of the incident is being filmed. After ensuring everyone is alright, they find out that the driver who is injured in the truck happens to be their school teacher, Dr. Woodward. They're warned by him not to say anything about the incident or else their family will die with them.
The town is showing many unusual symptoms after the incident such as missing people, runaway dogs, stolen electrical appliances and engines, and unstable electricity supply. Deputy Jackson Lamb (Joe's dad) suspects it's highly related to Air Force's suspicious doings but it's actually because of an alien released from the crashed train.
Joe and Alice slowly develop feelings for each other despite being banned by their fathers. Joe also has conflict with his best friend, Charles because they liked the same girl, Alice. Alice is kidnapped by the alien when she's running away from home after a fight with her father.
In order to chase down and capture the alien, the Air Force creates fake 'wildfire' so that people would leave the town. Joe and his friends discover the truth about the alien from Dr. Woodward's research while they're finding ways to save Alice. Joe saves Alice from the alien but he is caught by it. He convinces the alien about stop hating on human. The alien is then distracted by the noise of its spaceship out there. The alien gets into its spaceship made up of metal items and leave the earth. Joe and Alice reconcile with their fathers at the end.
Unlike any typical Sci-Fi Thriller film, the story of Super 8 is led by a group of teenagers who have dreams to produce film. The choice of story setting to begin the film makes it seemed nothing to do with Sci-Fi at first because we don't see any sign of it and looks pretty normal. As the story among the characters go on and get more complicated, we could see what's really happening in the town and what does the crashing incident eventually leads to.
The alien element is inserted as backstory of the film. It did not show much about the story of how alien come to earth and being captured by human. The film slowly reveal bits of the story throughout the film and expose almost everything in the end. The plot of entire film mainly surrounds the conflicts among the teenagers instead of the alien. I think it's quite unique to choose passionate teenagers' story to pair up with alien story in this case because it's an interesting way of indirect-storytelling for this genre.
Although the CGI and SFX in the film are pretty well done, I find some scenes illogical and it kinda bothers me as I watch the film. The accident scene where the train and truck crashed on railway track makes no sense when the train blew up and flew in the air (greater impact than the truck has) after the collision because I believe that's not what a small truck could do to a train in reality.
When they're filming at train station as the train passes by (for the sake of so-called production value), I believe the mic would actually pick up the noise of train instead of dialogues said by the actors. Besides, the yellow car owned by Alice's father is surprisingly still in perfect state after such massive explosions and collision happen at the site. When Joe is convincing the alien not to hold grudges against human, and it actually works, that's probably the most ridiculous scene to me to be honest.
Script wise, there are parts where the story gets a little draggy especially when Joe and Charles are quarreling over train models and Alice.
Script wise, there are parts where the story gets a little draggy especially when Joe and Charles are quarreling over train models and Alice.
Frankly, the only part that I enjoyed watching the most is the zombie film, The Case shown at the ending credits of the movie. It's very low-budget but entertaining to watch and makes me forget about the frustration of the illogical scenes in the main film.
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