Movie review: Super 8 **

Super 8 **

Stars: Elle Fanning, Amanda Michalka and Kyle Chandler
Director: J.J. Abrams
Rated: PG-13
Showing: Southside Cinema week of Friday, June 24 - daily 7:30pm except Sunday 4:15/7:30pm. For more information about film times call, 297-2821.
Runtime:  112 minutes
Sci-Fi/Thriller

The new J.J. Abrams thriller "Super 8" takes place in 1979 in a pleasingly bland American every-suburb, the kind of place where Steven Spielberg famously set his classic science-fiction fantasies, "E.T." and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

The entirety of "Super 8," in fact, is pieced together from the recycled parts of Spielberg productions, including "The Goonies," "Poltergeist" and "*batteries not included" (Spielberg is one of the producers of this new film), along with other seminal '80s titles, like the Stephen King adaptation "Stand By Me."

Just like those other movies, this one is also about pre-teen kids fighting against slobbering monsters and suffocating adult authority. And yet, even for those of us who grew up on '80s American cinema, "Super 8" never quite comes alive.

Abrams (who also wrote the script) has created a universe so hermetically-sealed _ a movie that lives, breathes, eats and regurgitates other movies that nothing feels real, and nothing appears to be at stake. If the very fate of the universe seemed to hinge on whether E.T. would be able to phone home, the only thing that seems to matter in Super 8 is how many visual references to his cinematic heroes Abrams can cram onto the screen.

At the center of the story is a lonely adolescent named Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), whose mother has recently died in a factory accident, and whose police officer father (Kyle Chandler) doesn't know how to communicate with him. Joe finds solace in the company of his best buddy Charles (Riley Griffths), a budding movie director trying to make a short film his Super 8 camera.

With the help of two other pals and the pretty girl Alice (Elle Fanning) that they're all crushing upon, the boys find themselves shooting footage outside a train station late one night.

That's when a train speeding through the station crashes into a pickup truck driven by their math teacher (Glynn Turman), derailing spectacularly, and sending mysterious Rubik's cube-like objects across the landscape.

Given the nature of the set-up an accident, following quickly by spooky, unexplained events, like dogs disappearing from their houses it's a relief to discover that Abrams' doesn't head down the same convoluted path as his TV show "Lost."

There are (thankfully) no hidden universes or "flash-sideways," and when the big mystery is revealed, it turns out to be (marginally) plausible.

But from the start, "Super 8" lacks much in the way of heart.

Whereas Abrams' protege Matt Reeves burrowed agonizingly into the loneliness of kids who feel as if they've been orphaned in last year's Spielberg-flavored horror film "Let Me In," Abrams instead opts for cliche and visual shorthand a locket left by Joe's mother that's supposed to evoke melancholy, but mostly just comes off as another shiny object in a movie already cluttered with them.

The younger actors, many of them newcomers, have a sweet, funny rapport and for at least its first half gets by on their considerable charms.

As the United States Air Force enters the town and begins a mystery-shrouded investigation of the train crash, the kids decide to seize the opportunity and keep filming. ("Production value!" Charles keeps exclaiming, of the real-life chaos that the kids shoot their movie in front of.)

But Abrams doesn't fully trust the best of the '80s coming-of-age pictures, like "Stand by Me" and "E.T.," which allowed the audience to luxuriate for a very long time in the lacksidasical company of kids beginning to learn about the dark contours of the adult world. In its second half, "Super 8" devolves into a series of chases and explosions and overripe plot twists.

The small measure of humanity the actors brought to the picture evaporates entirely.

To be fair, there are some very striking stretches in the film; especially in the opening train crash, Abrams - as he did so brilliantly in the "Lost" pilot - allows us to view epic-scaled disaster through the eyes of ordinary people. But more often than not, the scares in "Super 8" come from sudden thuds on the soundtrack, and there's an almost shocking paucity of visual imagination. (Without giving anything away, let's just say that the most special effects-heavy sections of the movie look like outtakes from the Abrams-produced "Cloverfield.")

Indeed, the best thing in "Super 8" comes at the very end, when we finally watch Charles' move-within-a-movie playing alongside the closing credits. It's a grainy, four-minute zombie thriller, complete with awkward jump cuts and sub-par acting, and it displays the goofy wit, brevity and simple human touch that the rest of "Super 8" is so sorely lacking.