When J.J. Abrams wrote and directed this film, Steven Spielberg saw an opportunity he couldn’t refuse. “Super 8” is a modern-day re-telling of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) without the tale of friendship between the boy and his alien friend. Set almost 30 years apart, both films have their own problems to deal with. The modern-day “E.T. home phone” would’ve not worked had it not been for the complexity of the retelling. The film is era and politics-appropriate.
Even though the film is based around the late 1970s, the Soviet threat always loomed large for the USA. The biggest imagined opposition that the USA always had was the Soviets. This trend did not die down with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Part of being a democratic process or slight transgressions towards autocratic democracy, there’s always the need for the threat of an invisible enemy. This political anxiety is always maintained and sometimes exaggerated through the cinema and other mass mediums. Cohesiveness among the people can only be maintained if there is a crisis. This trope has been the core memory for any Hollywood film.
Hollywood’s use of the idea that crisis need not be averted but rather avenged gives rise to the birth of a hero. So, the Super 8 sub-film, which perfectly underlines the plot of the movie, also plays with the same principle. Last but not least, the film is also proof that the more you keep the audience in the dark as to what the danger actually looks like, the better the effect. The assumption that ‘what we fear is fear itself’ is the perfect storytelling technique.
Super 8 (2011) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
The film opens on a bleak winter morning as a young boy, Joe (Joel Courtney), is sitting on the porch swing with a bracelet in his hand. Inside, there’s a huge gathering of people all dressed in black, mourning the death of his mother. As evidenced by the conversation with their neighbor, they are concerned about Joe’s father’s inability to care for his son. In his yellow charger, a dodgy-looking fellow, Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard), pulls up to the wake. Joe’s father, Deputy Lamb (Kyle Chandler), takes one look at him and manhandles him into his Deputy’s car. Joe’s friends – Charles (Riley Griffiths), Preston (Zach Mills), Cary (Ryan Lee), and Martin (Gabriel Basso) – all huddle together, debating whether Joe is going to work in their film about zombies, considering his mother just passed away.
Why does Mr. Woodward crash the train?
As the scene quickly shifts to sunny Spring, and it’s the last day of school, Joe is definitely in a better mood, and both he and Charles decide that they will be shooting the new sequences that Charles had come up with at night. He also adds that Charles had Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) playing the role of the wife in the film, and Joe can’t imagine that he actually had spoken to her. As Joe returns to his home, Lamb is seen still coming to grips with the passing away of his wife. A father-son moment goes askew at dinner as Lamb wants to send Joe away to a summer baseball program that will benefit him as it did to him, utterly oblivious to what Joe actually wants.
The friends gather at midnight, waiting for Alice to pick them up. As she pulls up, she is a bit distraught seeing Joe there and assumes he will tell his father about her using the car when she doesn’t even have a license. Joe reassures her that this will remain a secret and she has nothing to worry about. They gather at the station and practice their lines as the rag-tag crew sets the film up. Alice’s rehearsal performance blows them away, and tender moments between Joe and Alice are filmed beautifully while Joe applies the makeup.
A still from Super 8 (2011)Soon, in the middle of the rehearsal, they notice a train approaching, and as many budding filmmakers would suggest, it definitely would add a lot of depth to their film, so they decide to shoot with the train in the background. As the shoot begins, Joe notices a car approaching the high-speed train head-on, which creates a collision. The kids somehow manage to hide and claw their way to safety while the entire train is blown to smithereens.
What is the Air Force hiding?
The group survives with a few scrapes and bruises. They make their way to the car that caused the collision and find that it is Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), their biology teacher at school. They recover a map outlining the route of the train only to find Woodward quite alive and ask them not to talk about this as “they” will definitely kill them. The group, worried, moves away from the accident scene as they see military officials making their way to the scene, not before Joe pockets a weird cube-looking object and collects their camera and equipment but leaves a few reels at the crime scene.
Charles and Joe cycle to the city the next day to develop their film, hoping that the broken camera can be mended by creepy Donny (David Gallagher), who just wants to get with Charles’ sister. They put in their order, which would be ready within the next three days, to figure out the next part of the plan. Strange things have started to happen around the town, and Deputy Lamb is trying to get to the root of it all. Engines from cars, people, and animals have gone missing. Deputy Lamb also alerts the Sheriff to the fact that the Air Force is doing the cleanup, and they are definitely going out of their way to hide something.
When the Sheriff goes missing, the town is put on high alert, and all of it falls on the shoulders of Deputy Lamb. He doesn’t get any clear answers from the Air Force official Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich). Lamb and his deputies start investigating the matter as electricity has gone off in the quaint town of Lillian and other counties. At a town hall meeting, one concerned citizen believes that this is the work of the Soviets. When a citizen mentions that the military is conversing over ham radio channels, Lamb tries to decode what it’s all about.
Is Joe in love with Alice?
Meanwhile, Joe cycles off to meet Alice at her place after she says she is not participating in the film. After a brief confrontation with Alice’s father, he cycles away. During another shooting sequence, the group, mainly Joe, continues the investigation and spends some more tender moments with Alice. During the shoot, Lamb takes Joe away after Louis complains to Lamb at the station that his son has been harassing his daughter. Since the shoot is happening in front of Woodward’s house, where Colonel Nelec is trying to find any evidence, he is confronted by Lamb about “Operation Walking Distance,” which he had heard snooping on those radio channels. Nelec, seeing no alternative, asks him to come to the base.
Lamb firmly orders Joe to stop hanging out with Alice, and finally, Joe snaps back at him, telling him that he doesn’t know anything about him or Alice. Lamb leaves to meet with the Colonel, only to be taken hostage. Joe goes to the cemetery to spend time with his mother and sees something strange in a nearby garage. Meanwhile, Alice comes late at night to spend some time with Joe. They look at the videos of Joe’s mother, and Alice confesses that her father was supposed to work, but he got drunk, and Joe’s mom had to pick his shift, leading to her death. Suddenly, the weird-looking cube object springs into life as if wanting to escape and finally does, leaving a massive hole in the wall.
Alice is confronted at home by her father, and she leaves on her cycle. Louis tries to apologize but gets into an accident. Suddenly, he sees the monster in his rearview mirror, which picks off Alice. Meanwhile, Nelec tortures Woodward and finally kills him when he doesn’t give any information but warns him that the monster will kill everyone. Nelec pushes his plan into overdrive as his soldiers set fire all over the forest area, trying to flush the monster.
Super 8 (2011) Movie Ending Explained:
Joe and Charles have a tiff over the fact that Charles liked Alice first, but Joe stole his girl. They suddenly are confronted with the footage from the night of the accident. They see the monster for the first time, and as they get ready to do something, the town is evacuated by the Air Force because of the forest fire. The group gets back together, and Joe meets Louis, who tells him that the monster has taken Alice away.
Can Joe save Alice?
Another still from Super 8 (2011)Joe and his group of friends seek Donny’s help and sneak back into town to go through Woodward’s materials at the school. They discover case files and video files in which Woodward mentions how the monster is an alien who crashed and landed in 1958. Since then, he has tried to leave, but Colonel Nelec has conducted experiments on the alien, making him hate the humans. The alien passes and understands information through tactile sensory measures.
While the group gets too engrossed in the information, the military comes inside and takes them. Meanwhile, Lamb frees himself from purgatory by dressing in military clothes. Lamb soon learns that Joe and his friends have gone into town. Both Louis and Lamb set off to save their kids. On their way back, the alien attacks the bus and kills Nelec and others while Joe and his friends flee. In the town, all the tanks and guns have started firing on their own. As Joe and Cary go to the alien’s lair, Martin gets hurt, and Charles stays to help him.
They soon discover that the alien is building something and all the missing people are there. Joe frees Alice by creating a distraction through Cary and his firecrackers. As they try to flee, the alien corners them, but Joe, after being picked up by the alien, helps him understand that he knows what it feels like to be alone and yearning to go home. The alien finally gets to form his ship through the weird-looking cube objects, which are shape-shifting alloys and leaves Earth. Joe and Alice reunite with their fathers with a newfound sense of joy and happiness. As the credits roll, the Super 8 film made by Charles is played for the audience.
How’s the relationship between father and son?
The whole film and many others are built around the premise that we, as human beings, do not understand how love works. Even though we have written books and songs about love and made romantic films, the concept of love always seems to elude us. The idea is not just that when you love someone, you let them go. That is idiotic as well. Love is about understanding what the other person wants and what the other person needs. Joe has no idea how to let go of his mother even though she has left him.
Joe’s love for his mother creates the distance between him and his father. This distance pushes him to make decisions that are not centered around what his father might say. His father doesn’t make it easy by pushing his son away as he deals with the loss of his wife, and there is no communication between father and son. It’s always better to share when dealing with loss, but this does not happen until the very end. In the scene where Joe defends Alice, he emphasizes that Alice is kind, which he doesn’t consider his father to be. As the final act of erasing the barrier between Joe and his father, he lets go of the bracelet with the image of him and his mother, thereby replacing his primary caregiver from his mother with his father.
What does the post-credit scene of Super 8 (2011) Movie tell us?
A film within a film. “Super 8” is definitely a play on the Super 8 films and how most of these filmmakers got interested in cinema through the Super 8 film form. It covers the basic trope of a zombie film and makes a very simple point: even though we might not be able to save everyone in this world, we want to save our loved ones. Joe and Lamb are both unable to save their loved one and in the narrative where the chemical infects the wife of the chief detective, he pushes the only dose of the cure to save her. Love trumps all.
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