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In 2011, J.J. Abrams directed his only original movie
Kyle Chandler perfected the dad role in this overlooked sci-fi movie
Kyle Chandler has had a major year. After building a career with roles in shows like Friday Night Lights and movies like Carol, Chandler has become one of the most solid on-screen presences. This year, he starred in HBO’s widely praised Lanterns, expanding the DC universe and delivering the definitive live-action take on Hal Jordan. It also delivered another great instance of Chandler as a reluctant father figure.
Years before mentoring John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), Chandler perfected the grumpy dad in an overlooked movie from 2011. Written and directed by J.J. Abrams and starring a cast led by talented kids (among them, Elle Fanning), Super 8 is one of my favorite Abrams movies. It’s still the only original film that Abrams has directed.
What is Super 8 about?
One of the best parts about Super 8 is how indebted it is to Steven Spielberg, who serves as one of the producers. Set in 1979 in a small town in Ohio, Super 8 follows Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), a 14-year-old boy who’s just lost his mom. His dad, Jackson (Chandler), is the deputy sheriff, and, in his grief, he winds up unable to really interact with his son at all. Jackson spends his days working, leaving Joe to fend for himself and spend the summer out of the house, riding bikes and making movies with his nerdy friends. It’s a full-on Amblin throwback that feels a lot like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. That’s absolutely on purpose.
Joe and his friends are hard at work on a zombie movie. He’s in the makeup department while the rest direct, shoot, and star in the project. Miraculously, they manage to get Alice (Fanning), the school’s mysterious cool girl, to play one of the lead roles. But during a late-night shoot, the group witnesses something inexplicable.
As they’re filming a scene with a train passing in the background, a truck veers onto the tracks, with the collision sparking a massive explosion. The kids approach the driver, who’s wounded but alive, and try to talk to him. The man scares them off, telling them to forget everything they’ve seen. The next day, the town is turned on its head: The military arrives, dogs go missing, and power blackouts begin. But what draws the kids fully into the mystery is what the camera captured that night: a mysterious and large creature getting out of the train.
This is where the E.T. homage truly kicks in. The creature is an alien that has been trapped on Earth for years, imprisoned by the government. As the story develops, the kids understand the alien, with Joe bonding with it and wanting to help it get home. Unlike E.T., this alien is large and scary (not that E.T. is that cute), possessing magnetic powers that the government wants to exploit.
The Amblin movie you need
Released in 2011, Super 8 came out before Stranger Things and captured that same nostalgic energy that turned the Netflix series into a worldwide phenomenon. The kids in Super 8 are charming and have great chemistry, with most of them well-drawn, with quirks and personality traits that make you care about them and their friendship. The movies they make are also amazing, showcasing great practical effects, like melting eyeballs. Even the gloriously melodramatic and awkward teen acting has its charm. In a film filled with military action and otherworldly intervention, the kids’ amateur movies might be the most unrealistic part; They’re just too good.
One of the standout dynamics is the one between Joe and Alice, whose nascent romance is complicated by the other boys’ crush on Alice and by her dad, who has a mysterious link to Joe’s family. Both have no mothers and tense relationships with their fathers. To the puzzlement of the rest of the friend group, Alice and Joe instantly recognize something in each other.
While watching the kids bicker and share the screen is delightful, the emotional weight of the story lies in Joe and Jackson’s relationship. After his wife’s death, Jackson doesn’t know how to connect or even speak with his son. At the start of the film, the only thing Jackson can think of is to ship Joe away to baseball camp. “It’s what we both need,” he says. Their relationship remains distant until the two grow more involved with the mystery in the town, with Jackson leading the adult half of the film as the police investigate the strange occurrences.
Guarded and gruff dad is a role that Chandler has been playing in some form or another for years, from his work as Coach Taylor in Friday Night Lights to Hal Jordan in Lanterns. Chandler plays Jackson as an aloof and stubborn guy, unwilling to connect with the most important person in his life. Still, he offers so much empathy that you can’t help but root for him and hope he can figure out how to express himself before it’s too late.
Super 8 isn’t perfect and loses steam in its third act once the mystery needs resolving. Still, it’s a great example of Abrams’ strengths as a storyteller. We all know he can lead a franchise, but Abrams also has a knack for anchoring his big movies with genuine emotion, like grief and the wistfulness of growing up. On the surface, Super 8 is a monster movie, but what sticks are the kids’ friendships and the father-son story at its core. And if that’s not enough of a selling point, the dad is peak Kyle Chandler.
Super 8 is streaming on Peacock