A Film Canon

Like Take Shelter, Super 8 plays like a belated, idiosyncratic attempt to complete Spielberg's shelved Watch The Skies project, here positioned somewhere between Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and The War Of The Worlds. However, whereas Take Shelter eschews or at least pathologises nostalgia, Super 8 performs a kind of second-order nostalgia, a nostalgia for Spielberg's own nostalgia mode, that nevertheless also reflects a cinematic universe in which regular nostalgia has been overexposed and exhausted. As a result, the central fantasy of the film is that digital cinematography existed in the the late 70s, in the guise of the Super 8 filming equipment that a group of young children use to make a zombie film - set, appropriately in the 50s - and that inadvertently captures an alien invasion, in a kind of attenuation of Paranormal Activity over the three days it takes for the film to be developed. Raised on ultra-violence and suburban horror, these children are on the cusp of a Spielbergian universe, and the question the film poses is whether a more accidental, contingent recording might have captured the same lush, nostalgic world. By the same token, it's a world that hasn't quite formulated the 50s as its nostalgic object, and so it's appropriate that the alien's invasion dates from the 50s, and that its narrative is redolent of the basic 50s science fiction narrative, in which an ostensible monster is demonstrated to actually be an empathic surface, under the right conditions. It's a premise that doesn't require exquisite direction so much as exquisite quotation and production - and the studied pastiche and cliche that Abrams employed in Star Trek is not only less grating but completely appropriate here since, unlike that film, Super 8 has no pretension to auteurist, bombastic reinvention, but rather to a kind of amauteur appreciation. If it's a myth of origins, it's not of a particular character or narrative, but of a whole mindscape - and, as a result, the entire film feels stagy, not so much in the sense of being filmed on a set, but of taking place in a world that's composed of celluloid. Hence Abrams' only real aesthetic signature - the overexposure of light to produce blue lines and halos analogous to those produced by looking into the Super 8 apparatus itself, and the accompanying intensification of darkness, until each pocket of midwestern life feels like an island, or frame, in the vastness of celluloid space. In other words, it's a producer's film - or, alternatively, a film that Spielberg could only have produced  - with the possible exception of the final film-within-the-film, which feels like a throwback to his late 60s and 70s output, dovetailing the emergence of Super 8 with the frame in which Spielberg became Spielberg.