It’s weird to think, but before the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy—back even before everyone pretended they always hated The Force Awakens, even though their posts on social media circa the weekend of December 18th, 2015 would likely beg to differ—there was a time when JJ Abrams was considered the savior of franchises, and him being attached as the director of a project was celebrated. When he was hired on for The Force Awakens, it helped give the film an extra boost of nerd cred, considering his rebooted Star Trek films—the Kelvin Timeline, as some like to call it—acted as a proof-of-concept that he would be the right man for the job to direct a Star Wars movie. Cut to right now; opinions have not so much shifted but swayed on Abrams as a filmmaker following his entries in the Star Wars franchise.
Some people like him, some don’t, and some really don’t. But for as much as people criticize his films in the Sequel Trilogy, with people complaining that The Rise of Skywalker was a mess and The Force Awakens played it too safe as a soft reboot of A New Hope (all the while forgetting that Creed came out a month earlier and recycled a lot from the original Rocky and everyone loved it, but that gets a pass for some reason), Abrams was ahead of the curve. Not with his Star Wars films, though a compelling argument could be made that Hollywood’s desire to bring back old franchises stems directly from the success of The Force Awakens; no, he inadvertently established the instruction manual for Hollywood’s eventual fetishization of nostalgia before that. More specifically, nostalgia for the ‘70s and ‘80s. Abrams snuck in a little film, as writer and director—which, to date, is his only movie not to be tied to a pre-existing IP—and that film is Super 8.
The story follows the tweenager—yep, that’s a word—by the name of Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) as he spends the early days of his summer vacation making a zombie movie with his friends, all while being at arm’s length from his estranged father (Kyle Chandler) and dodging the grief of losing his mother in a factory accident four months prior. After narrowly surviving a wild train accident while filming their movie, Joe and his friends are unaware that something escaped from the train and is quietly wreaking havoc around their small town.
Released in 2011, and hot off the success of Abrams’ recent venture in the Star Trek franchise, Super 8, Abrams’s guide to properly executing nostalgia, harkens back to the early blockbuster films of Steven Spielberg—a prominent producer on the project—in the vein of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Comparisons have also been made to The Goonies…why The Monster Squad never gets brought up in those coming-of-age adventure films of the ‘80s is anyone’s guess—though that guess should have an undercurrent of seething rage because The Monster Squad is great. If you’ve never seen Super 8 and the title doesn’t clue you in because you’re not familiar with consumer-grade cameras produced by Kodak in the 1970s—believe it or not, that’s not common knowledge for most people—the film takes place in 1979. At the time of its release, the film and Abrams got a lot of flak—okay, maybe not a lot, but a distinct amount of flak—for skimming too much off the top of the movies that it’s paying homage to. The weird part about it, and why you’ve been summoned here today upon court order, isn’t that people took issue with the film’s alleged over-indulgence in nostalgia; it’s that, with the benefit of hindsight, especially when living in a post-Stranger Things world, the film is so tame by comparison, and if it had only come out a few years later, the opinions of people who criticized the film probably would’ve softened.
We’ve seemingly gotten over the hump, but after the wild success of Stranger Things on TV and Abrams’s films in cinemas, there was this insane revival of movies reminding people how much they love the ‘80s, whether they lived through the decade or not. You’ve got Air, Wonderwoman 1984, IT: Chapter One, Summer of 84, Totally Killer, The 4:30 Movie, Ready Player One, Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Kung Fury, Turbo Kid, Bumblebee, Everybody Wants Some!!, and plenty of others. Movie studios were desperate to remind people that the ‘80s existed. This wasn’t a drastically new concept, considering if we date back to just a few years before Stranger Things, there’s Take Me Home Tonight, Hot Tub Time Machine, and Adventureland, and Abrams’s prior mention Star Trek saga, but afterward, there was a noticeable upswing of basking in the glow of nostalgia. As the saying goes, nostalgia is a hell of a drug… though if you’ve read or seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you know ether is pretty intense, too.
Nostalgia for a particular decade isn’t wholly new in movies, but some films relish it to the point of it being part of the selling point. The term “Member Berries” gets thrown around a lot to get across the idea of indulging in the comfort and rose-tinted glasses that nostalgic iconography can bring, but for some movies, those details can overpower the film as a whole. Hot Tub Time Machine went all out on pop culture references, but part of the joke was how blasé they were about it. It’s like it wasn’t trying to show the ‘80s as it was; it was portraying how people remember it. But Hot Tub Time Machine did that ironically…some movies just do that. It’s the semi-manipulative way to get people to like your film by distracting them with things they recognize to elicit a positive response, regardless of whether or not it detracts from the movie. Ghostbusters: Afterlife was fun, but it’d be way better if it didn’t have glory shots of Twinkies with the same awe and wonder as an Indiana Jones movie treats the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. That’s where Super 8 and Abrams have a leg up.
For all the talk of Super 8 aping off classic Spielberg films—JJ Abrams even references it in the commentary track when the Amblin logo pops up by saying that E.T. is literally in the movie—when compared to other nostalgia-fused films made in the last decade. The E.T. comparisons always felt pretty trite, considering once you take away the coming-of-age angle tied to an alien being around and the romantic perception of the aliens going home at the end, the two movies have nothing in common. E.T. is cute and he’s Elliott’s best friend; Cooper (the alien of Super 8) is a scary monster who kills, and eats people but has little to do with the lead characters’ story until the third act. Then again, both movies involve kids riding bikes, so that’s basically a one-to-one comparison (he said with intense sarcasm). Most of the other tropes that can be attributed to Spielberg, like the mostly-unseen monster, the shadowy government, and the broken family dynamic, are stylistic nods, but they’re not unique only to him. The ‘Unseen Evil’ trope was for sure popularized because of Jaws, but at this point, that’s just engrained in the language of cinema which is why Abrams wrote it in.
The lack of direct references to Spielberg’s work within the reality of the film is noteworthy for how it helped influence the perception of the characters. Even though it would’ve been totally plausible for Joe’s best friend Charles (Riley Griffith) to have his room filled with posters from Jaws and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, according to the commentary track, Spielberg didn’t want any references to his movies because he didn’t want it to seem self-indulgent. So, Abrams switched the posters to Dawn of the Dead and the original Halloween because he decided Charles would be a horror fan, which explains why the film he chose to make would be a zombie movie.
Those posters are also the closest the movie gets to actually making topical references. Even though the kids are making a movie and are clearly movie fans—Joe has a small Star Wars poster in his room and is seen painting a model of The Invisible Man—there’s no dialogue in the entire movie that would clue you in on what was a popular film at the time. Keep in mind that 1979 was the year of Alien, Apocalypse Now, and Rocky II, and none of them were name-dropped like they might be if Abrams made Super 8 today. That doesn’t sound incredibly impressive, but the amount of restraint displayed here is commendable when you consider how modern movies love to have topical dialogue that hammers home the decade it takes place in. If you’re thinking to yourself, hey, those films wouldn’t be released yet when the story takes place, and something like Alien got its props way after its theatrical release, kindly stop and ask yourself when semantics like that have ever stopped filmmakers before.
Abrams’s style and by extension, Super 8 is unique because it gives the warm fuzzies of nostalgia without getting in its own way or glorifying the era. All the adults are always mad about something; there’s Cold War paranoia when things start to get nasty in town, and, sure, it’s about a group of kids making a movie over the summer and having an exciting adventure, but the film never pretends like the ‘70s were the Halcyon Days for everyone. The era of the film is almost incidental to the plot and feels more like a sentimental decision than a stylistic one on Abrams’ part as we see in later films. The fact that the film is as reserved as it is makes it an oddity in Abrams’ filmography. When you factor in that his next film, Star Trek Into Darkness, was chock full of obvious references to illicit audience reactions—The Rise of Skywalker was criticized for doing the same thing—Super 8 is still shockingly subtle by comparison. People gave it grief for being too much of an homage to Spielberg, but in a world where Stranger Things is one of the most popular things ever and has received high praise for that same reason, why not give Super 8 another chance and Abrams more creative freedom?
