The film Super 8 – written and directed by J.J Abrams - is within the Science Fiction based genre; it has various conventions of this type on genre including; an enemy threat, from outer space/aliens; has many special effects, etc. The director, Abrams has paid homage to the well known director, Stephen Spielberg; as he has used many of the typical conventions included in Spielberg’s films. These are aspects such as; similar visual effects – special effects, explosions, etc – and having children as the main protagonists. There are many different aspects which makes this a brilliant film, such as; the characters, the use of tension and mystery and the special effects.
The basic plot of this film is that a group of friends set out to create a super 8 movie. Whilst doing so, at their location, there is an enormous and catastrophic train crash. The group of friends flee the exploding scene, however, leaving their camera running. When they return after it settling, they discover some obscure and unknown objects, they also realise that the collision was intended and not a coincidental accident. Soon after, a series of unexplained disappearances and calamities occur over town. When they finally realise the cause – it is something no one could have imagined.
The characters in this film are played by young actors such as; Elle Fanning as Alice, Joel Courtney as Joe, Riley Griffiths as Charles, all along side others. The use of children as the main characters makes the whole situation seem more thrilling and exciting, due to them still being quite naive and them not being as rational as adults. This also adds to the mystery of the plot – as they know as much as we do. Additionally, they add to the use of light-hearted humour and banter that we can relate to – as it brings us back to our more youthful and care free years. In effect this helps us to empathise and like the characters much more and we feel the need to root for them to find out the cause of all the mishap.
I especially liked the tension and mystery of this film as it could put us at the edge of our seats at a drop of a hat. This was down to the use of sound/music along with what we were seeing on screen. For example if there was a part where something mysterious and unrevealing was happening – the music would reflect this. Another thing I picked up on was the use of focus during the shots. For instance, on a shot, what was in the background would be focused when there wasn’t much going on, however, when the unknown creature was doing something to a citizen of the town or to a place; it went out of focus and whatever was in the foreground – a person for example – would be in focus. This teases the audience as we can see something is going on but we don’t know exactly what. Consequently, right at the end, we finally find out what the mysterious, unknown creature is and vaguely, what it was doing on earth.
A convention of the Sci-Fi genre is the visual effects such as the explosions. This film did not lack in this field. The train crash – what was pretty much at the beginning of the film – gripped and made the audience pay attention due to what we could see; which were huge, loud, fiery explosions.
The thing I was disappointed with in this film was the ending, to me it seemed rushed. As firstly, we didn’t find out that much about the alien creature, what it actually was and what it wanted. It just flew away after it realised something – which I don’t know exactly what it was it realised... Also, we don’t really know what was going to happen to the group of friends.
Overall, I did quite enjoy this film – even though I didn’t really expect to – which was mainly down to the mystery of it. The only thing I didn’t like was the ending which left me a little baffled. Therefore I would give it a 7/10.
