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T O P I C R E V I E W
BaftaBaby
Posted - 21/08/2011 : 14:13:51 I did a search to see if this film's been covered b4, but couldn't find one. Apologies if I missed it.
Here's another film determined to make you sit through the end credits if you really want to put the film you've just seen in proper perspective.
And that film - though a shadow too long - is quite a triumph. Both for writer/director JJ Abrams fitting most of his round pegs into Spielbergian square holes - and for a cast that curbs any attempt to subvert the ensemble nature of the piece.
In the latter they succeed so well that they capture the essence of small town American life in the late 1970s. It's a strange era between a recent hippie-dom that hadn't yet reached the boonies, and a world increasingly expecting fulfilment from the technological promises that seemed so near and yet so far away.
What better setting for a tale centered on the old stand-by - pre-teens coming of age. But this time they become not only witnesses to but active players in a fantasy story which mirrors the complexity of their nascent emotions.
All the best kids' stories do this, but lately the film world has reduced the genre to excuses for big-budget/small screenplay treatments of x-box idiocy played by game-boys.
Make no mistake, Super 8 does have a creature which surely will inhabit a game this Christmas.
But more importantly, it re-introduces a check-list of admirable narrative ingredients including charm, non-sexual passion, empathy, curiosity, eureka moments of cause and effect, shattered illusions that might be repaired, comeraderie without sentimentality, and -- okay a bit of sentiment. Plus some others I've missed out at the moment.
The kids are especially terrific, and I've read that Joel Courtney's already involved in a Tom Sawyer remake in the title role.
